As I was working on the ELCImagePickerController, bringing it up to speed for iOS 5, I needed to get some images inside my iOS simulator. I did some googling and came up with the handy method of dragging and dropping images onto the simulator and using Safari to save them to a photo album. This is all well and good for four or five photos, but it starts to really slow down after that. Also, if you ever run into a situation where you need to reset the simulator you’re stuck with doing it all over again. For the love of all that is automation, and of course any excuse to start new project in iOS 5, I knew it was time for a utility to handle this task for me.

With that, I give you ELCImageGrabber.

This was a quick project, so it’s not the prettiest interface, but it sure gets the job done. Tell it how many photos you want and watch as the previews go by and get stored in your photo library. The 64 images at a time limit is imposed by the Google image API for a single request, but there are plenty of ways around it. Also, I’ve hardcoded the search term in the source code, but perhaps you want rainbows and unicorns instead? I hope people find this useful and change it up to fit their needs as well. I’d love to see pull requests for any useful features that you lovely readers might add!

Get the code here!