How to render a UIView to a UIImage

Swift version: 5.10

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

You can render any UIView into a UIImage in just four lines of code, and that even handles drawing all the subviews automatically. Here's the code:

let renderer = UIGraphicsImageRenderer(size: view.bounds.size)
let image = renderer.image { ctx in
    view.drawHierarchy(in: view.bounds, afterScreenUpdates: true)
}

Helpfully, that code works equally well no matter what the view contains - if you're using UIKit, SpriteKit, Metal or whatever, it all works.