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The PhotoEditor SDK offers a camera implementation for iOS to complement your editor, featuring essential camera components as well as live filters.

Camera tool

The PhotoEditor SDK offers a lightning fast camera implementation for iOS to complement your editor, featuring all essential camera components as well as live filters.

In order to use the camera, you have to instantiate a CameraViewController and present it. You can configure the camera to suit your needs using the CameraViewControllerOptions. To do so, you have to pass a Configuration object to the CameraViewControllers initializer. If no configuration is passed, the default configuration will be used.

Warning: When adding a camera to your app, don't forget to set the required NSCameraUsageDescription and NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription keys in the Info.plist file of your app. This is forced by iOS and allows your app to access the device's camera and location, which is needed to tag photos with their location. If you want to allow photo roll access, you'll have to set the NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription as well.

The options allow you to configure the available flash modes, a forced square crop, tap to focus, allowed flash modes and a bunch of other stuff. Furthermore, you may disable camera roll access or live filters. Presenting the default camera editor can be done using the following code:

let cameraViewController = CameraViewController()
present(cameraViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)

A more complex configuration, e.g. a camera without flash and filters, and limited to the front camera, could be created like this:

let configuration = Configuration { builder in
  builder.configureCameraViewController { options in
    // Disable filters
    options.showFilters = false

    // Force a selfie camera
    options.allowedCameraPositions = [ .front ]

    // Disable flash
    options.allowedFlashModes = [ .off ]

To have a look at an example implementation please refer to demo repository and to see our camera in action, check out our example app.

Live filter preview#

The live filter preview allows your users to test different filters on the current image. The available filters may be configured using the Effect.all array as described in the filters section or disabled as shown in the example above.