Cropping an UIImage

Question

I've got some code that resizes an image so I can get a scaled chunk of the center of the image - I use this to take a UIImage and return a small, square representation of an image, similar to what's seen in the album view of the Photos app. (I know I could use a UIImageView and adjust the crop mode to achieve the same results, but these images are sometimes displayed in UIWebViews).

I've started to notice some crashes in this code and I'm a bit stumped. I've got two different theories and I'm wondering if either is on-base.

Theory 1) I achieve the cropping by drawing into an offscreen image context of my target size. Since I want the center portion of the image, I set the CGRect argument passed to drawInRect to something that's larger than the bounds of my image context. I was hoping this was Kosher, but am I instead attempting to draw over other memory that I shouldn't be touching?

Theory 2) I'm doing all of this in a background thread. I know there are portions of UIKit that are restricted to the main thread. I was assuming / hoping that drawing to an offscreen view wasn't one of these. Am I wrong?

(Oh, how I miss NSImage's drawInRect:fromRect:operation:fraction: method.)

Answer 1

Update 2014-05-28: I wrote this when iOS 3 or so was the hot new thing, I'm certain there are better ways to do this by now, possibly built-in. As many people have mentioned, this method doesn't take rotation into account; read some additional answers and spread some upvote love around to keep the responses to this question helpful for everyone.

Original response:

I'm going to copy/paste my response to the same question elsewhere:

There isn't a simple class method to do this, but there is a function that you can use to get the desired results: CGImageCreateWithImageInRect(CGImageRef, CGRect) will help you out.

Here's a short example using it:

CGImageRef imageRef = CGImageCreateWithImageInRect([largeImage CGImage], cropRect);
// or use the UIImage wherever you like
[UIImageView setImage:[UIImage imageWithCGImage:imageRef]]; 
CGImageRelease(imageRef);