react-native-photos-framework

npm i react-native-photos-framework --save

Load photos and albums from CameraRoll and iCloud. Uses Apples photos framework.

React Native comes with it's own CameraRoll library. This however uses ALAssetLibrary which is deprecated from Apple and can only load photos and videos stored on the users device. This is not what your user expects today. Most of users photos today live on iCloud and these won't show if you use ALAssetLibrary.

If you use this library/Photos framework you can display the users local resources and the users iCloud resources.

Retrieving images:

import RNPhotosFramework from 'react-native-photos-framework';

    RNPhotosFramework.getPhotos({
          //You can call this function multiple times providing startIndex and endIndex as pagination
          startIndex : 0,
          endIndex : 100,

          //Media types you wish to display. See table bellow for possible options.
          mediaTypes : ['photo', 'video'],
          mediaSubTypes : ['photoPanorama'],

            //Where is the image located? See table bellow for possible options.
            sourceTypes : ['userLibrary']

          sortAscending : true,
          sortDescriptorKey : 'creationDate',

          //Start loading images into memory with these displayOptions (Not required)
          prepareForSizeDisplay : {
            width : 91.5,
            height : 91.5
          },
          prepareScale : 2
        }).then((images) => console.log(images));

Props to getPhotos

Retrieving albums and enumerating their images:

return RNPhotosFramework.getAlbums(
    {
      type: 'album',
      subType: 'any',
      assetCount: 'exact',
      prepareForEnumeration: true,
      fetchOptions: {
        sortDescriptorKey: 'creationDate',
        sortAscending: true,
        includeHiddenAssets: false,
        includeAllBurstAssets: false
      }
    }
  ).then((queryResult) => {
  const album = queryResult.albums[0];
  return album.getPhotos({
    //The fetch-options from the outer query will apply 	here, if we get
    startIndex : 0,
    endIndex : 10,
    prepareForSizeDisplay: {
      width: 91.5,
      height: 91.5
    },
    prepareScale: 2
  }).then((photos) => {
         console.log(photos, 'The photos in the first album');
  });
});

Props to getAlbums

Get collections allow to query the Photos Framework for photo-albums. Both User-created ones and Smart-albums. Note that Apple creates a lot of dynamic, so called Smart Albums, like : 'Recently added', 'Favourites' etc.

NOTE: There is also another method called getAlbumsMany. This could be considered a low-level-method of the API. It is constructed so that this library can build more accessable methods on top of one joint native-call: like getUserTopAlbums in pure JS. The getAlbumsMany-api can take multiple queries (array) and return an array.