onevcat/kingfisher

Analysis updated 2026-06-21

★ 24,320SwiftAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Kingfisher))
    What it does
      Download images async
      Cache in memory
      Cache on disk
    Features
      Background loading
      Image processing
      Round corners
      Fade animations
    Use Cases
      Profile pictures
      Product photos
      Social media feeds
    Tech Stack
      Swift
      UIKit
      SwiftUI

mindmap root((Kingfisher)) What it does Download images async Cache in memory Cache on disk Features Background loading Image processing Round corners Fade animations Use Cases Profile pictures Product photos Social media feeds Tech Stack Swift UIKit SwiftUI

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Load user profile pictures from a URL into a UIImageView without blocking the app's main thread or freezing the UI.

USE CASE 2

Display product photos in a SwiftUI list that loads lazily and caches images so they don't re-download on scroll.

USE CASE 3

Apply round corners and fade-in animations to remote images as they load in a social media feed.

USE CASE 4

Automatically serve lower-resolution images when a user's device is in Low Data Mode to reduce bandwidth.

What is it built with?

SwiftUIKitSwiftUI

How does it compare?

	onevcat/kingfisher	reactivex/rxswift	swiftyjson/swiftyjson
Stars	24,320	24,647	22,954
Language	Swift	Swift	Swift
Setup difficulty	easy	moderate	easy
Complexity	2/5	3/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

License not mentioned in the explanation.

In plain English

Kingfisher is a Swift library for iOS and macOS apps that handles loading images from the internet. The problem it solves is a common one in mobile development: you have an app that needs to display user profile pictures, product photos, or any other images hosted on a remote server. Doing this correctly, without freezing the app while the image downloads, while also not re-downloading the same image every time, requires a fair amount of plumbing. Kingfisher handles all of that for you. It downloads images asynchronously in the background so the user interface never locks up. Once an image is downloaded, it is stored in two places: memory (for fast, instant access while the app is open) and disk (so the image is available even after the app is closed and reopened). This caching system is fully configurable, you can set expiration times and size limits. Beyond basic downloading and caching, Kingfisher includes image processing tools that let you resize images to fit a display, apply round corners, and add fade-in animations when images appear. It also supports Apple's Low Data Mode, letting you serve lower-resolution images when a user's connection is limited. An iOS or macOS developer would add Kingfisher to their app any time they need to display images from a URL. It works with both UIKit (the traditional Apple UI framework) and SwiftUI (the newer declarative framework), and is written entirely in Swift.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Using Kingfisher, load an image from a remote URL into a UIImageView in my iOS app and show a placeholder image while it downloads.

Prompt 2

How do I configure Kingfisher's disk cache to expire images after 7 days and limit the total cache size to 500MB in my Swift app?

Prompt 3

In a SwiftUI app, use Kingfisher's KFImage view to display a remote image with circular cropping and a fade-in animation when it loads.

Prompt 4

How do I preload a list of image URLs with Kingfisher so the images are already cached before the user scrolls to them in a table view?

Prompt 5

Set up Kingfisher to automatically switch to a lower-resolution image URL when the user's iPhone is in Low Data Mode.

Frequently asked questions

What is kingfisher?

Kingfisher is a Swift library for iOS and macOS apps that downloads images from the internet in the background and caches them in memory and on disk, so images load fast and never re-download unnecessarily.

What language is kingfisher written in?

Mainly Swift. The stack also includes Swift, UIKit, SwiftUI.

What license does kingfisher use?

License not mentioned in the explanation.

How hard is kingfisher to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is kingfisher for?

Mainly developer.

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