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iosswiftimagevideocamera-roll

Can I get absolute URI of video on camera roll and mutate it from my app?

I want to perform an operation on a video in the iphone camera roll, and I require an absolute URI as I will be using ffmpeg natively within my app.

Is it possible to operate on the video in place? or would I need to copy the video to a tmp dir, operate on it, and then write back to the camera roll?

Solution

  • I've read some docs and tutorials and answering below based on that research.

    Is it possible to operate on the video in place?

    Yes (By copying it to temp dir) and No (to the original location where the video is actually stored)

    Take a look at the following image and quote from official docs

    enter image description here

    Using PhotoKit, you can fetch and cache assets for display and playback, edit image and video content or manage collections of assets such as albums, Moments, and Shared Albums.

    We don't have direct access to the location where the image/video is stored instead we get raw data or representation using PHAsset and Asset objects are immutable so we can't perform operations directly on it. We would need PHAssetChangeRequest to create, delete, change the metadata for, or edit the content of a Photos asset.

    would I need to copy the video to a temp dir, operate on it, and then write back to the camera roll?

    Yep, that's the way to go.