Objective-c – Moving UITabBarItem Image down

cocoa-touchiphoneobjective cuitabbaruitabbaritem

Normally on each tab of a UITabBar you have a small image and a title naming the tab. The image is positioned/centred towards the top of the tab to accommodate the title underneath. My question is: if you want to have a tabBar with just an image and no title is there a way to move the image down so it centers better within the tab?

I am using (see below) currently:

[tabBarItem setFinishedSelectedImage:tabSelected withFinishedUnselectedImage:tabUnselected];

but would prefer to use to larger image with no title, at the moment if I make the image bigger than about 70pixels@2x it starts edging off the top of the UITabBar whilst leaving a lot of unused space at the bottom.

Best Answer

Try adjusting tabBarItem's imageInsets (for moving the icon image) and setting the controllers title to nil (so no title is displayed). Put something like this to -init or -viewDidLoad method in view controller:

Objective-C

self.tabBarItem.imageInsets = UIEdgeInsetsMake(6, 0, -6, 0);
self.title = nil;

Swift

self.tabBarItem.imageInsets = UIEdgeInsets(top: 6, left: 0, bottom: -6, right: 0)
self.title = nil

UITabBarItem is a subclass of UIBarItem which has UIEdgeInsets imageInsets property. Play a little with the insets until it looks good (depending on your tabbar icon images)