I’m building a photo‑gallery view that mimics the iOS Photos app when it’s zoomed in to the maximum level: all years are displayed at once, with roughly 400 tiny thumbnails per page. The user experience of the system app is that the view is instantly visible, and scrolling keeps thumbnails instantly appearing.
I’ve already tried fetching thumbnails with PHImageManager and PHCachingImageManager, requesting the .fastFormat representation. However, the thumbnails still take several seconds to load, so the scrolling experience is noticeably laggy compared to the system app.
Is there another approach or technique—perhaps a different caching strategy, pre‑fetching, or a lower‑level API—that would allow me to retrieve and display thumbnails as quickly (or faster) than the native Photos app? Any guidance or code snippets would be greatly appreciated.