Subclassing UIImagePickerController?

A picker controller is just a UIViewController. A view controller has a UIView (view). A view has subviews. I'd start by using the debugger and NSLog statements and dig into the view structure trying to find out what's in there. Once you know the components you might be able to replace or change them.

Keep in mind that whatever you do in this regard could break anytime Apple puts out an update.

Iterate over all the subviews in the controller's view. Print the class name for each. The text could be a title for a nav bar or tool bar. Or it could just be rendered text which will make it more difficult to replace because then you will need to draw over it.

The header file may not help because most (if not all) of the subviews are not referenced in an instance variable.

Something like this in your controller:

for (UIView *view in self.view.subviews) {
 NSLog(@"view is a %@", [view description]);
}

Run this in 'viewDidAppear:' or something similar.

Be aware that this would be non-standard behavior and could be rejected by Apple.

I'm having a very similar problem. I'd like to get rid of the standard "Take Picture" navigation bar. What's here so far has been helpful, but I still haven't had any luck getting rid of it. Any help would be very much appreciated.

(As an example, Phanfare has a custom bar at the top showing upload progress).

I just found an easy way to do this. UIImagePickerController takes a delegate. This delegate has two protocols - UIImagePickerControllerDelegate and UINavigationControllerDelegate. I added the 'willShowViewController' delegate method to my class. This will get called just before the image picker displays.

This method gets passed a navigation controller and a view controller. You can do something like this:

- (void)navigationController:(UINavigationController *)navigationController willShowViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController animated:(BOOL)animated {
 UINavigationBar *bar = navigationController.navigationBar;
 UINavigationItem *top = bar.topItem;
 top.prompt = @"Custom prompt on my picker";
 top.title = @"Custom Picker Title";
}

Now that you have access to the navigation item you can customize all you want including setting a custom title view. This may be what Phanfare is doing.

I know this works with an image picker of type 'Saved Photos Album' because I'm doing it as of 30 minutes ago. I'm assuming it will work with the 'Camera' picker too.

That helped a lot! Thanks very much.

Hello,

After much trial and error, I finally figured out how to add my own views to the tab bar for the camera control (similar to Phanfare - see http://help.phanfare.com/index.php/PhanfareiPhoneApplication). However, I would like to remove the translucent "Take Picture" text label (which I assume is a subview of the main view). Anybody have any ideas how to hide/remove it?

Thanks.

This is a nice technique. I am experiencing one quirk.

I had added a UIBarButtonItem as the leftBarButtonItem of the UINavigationItem in the album photo picker and it looks and works fine.

However, if the user clicks on an album in the picker to drill into the contents of that album, my custom left button quickly jumps up several pixels as the navigation animation wipes to the left to display the next view. It looks really bad, and I am just wondering if anyone has ideas as to why this happens, or if there might be a workaround.

It works for the camera capture too - just wrote a short article on my blog discussing the view hierarchy that you can manipulate:

See: http://blog.airsource.co.uk/index.php/2008/11/11/views-of-uiimagepickercontrolle r/

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