Avoid animation of UICollectionView after reloadItemsAtIndexPaths

I wrote a category on UICollectionView to do just that. The trick is to disable all animations while reloading:

if (!animated) {
    [CATransaction begin];
    [CATransaction setValue:(id)kCFBooleanTrue forKey:kCATransactionDisableActions];
}

[self reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];

if (!animated) {
    [CATransaction commit];
}

UICollectionView animate items after reloadItemsAtIndexPaths is called (fade animation).

Is there a way to avoid this animation?

iOS 6

I assume you're using a FlowLayout. Since you're trying to get rid of the fade animation, try this:

import UIKit

class NoFadeFlowLayout: UICollectionViewFlowLayout {

    override func initialLayoutAttributesForAppearingItem(at itemIndexPath: IndexPath) -> UICollectionViewLayoutAttributes? {
        let attrs = super.initialLayoutAttributesForAppearingItem(at: itemIndexPath)
        attrs?.alpha = 1.0
        return attrs
    }

    override func finalLayoutAttributesForDisappearingItem(at itemIndexPath: IndexPath) -> UICollectionViewLayoutAttributes? {
        let attrs = super.finalLayoutAttributesForDisappearingItem(at: itemIndexPath)
        attrs?.alpha = 1.0
        return attrs
    }

}

This is a very old question, so you're probably not targeting iOS 6 anymore. I was personally working on tvOS 11 and had the same question, so this is here for anyone who comes along with the same problem.

It's worth noting that if you're targeting iOS 7 and above, you can use the new UIView method performWithoutAnimation:. I suspect that under the hood this is doing much the same as the other answers here (temporarily disabling UIView animations / Core Animation actions), but the syntax is nice and clean.

So for this question in particular...

Objective-C:

[UIView performWithoutAnimation:^{
    [self.collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
}];

Swift:

UIView.performWithoutAnimation {
    self.collectionView.reloadItemsAtIndexPaths(indexPaths)
}

Of course this principle can be applied for any situation that you want to ensure a change is not animated.

You could also try this:

UICollectionView *collectionView;

...

[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO];

[collectionView performBatchUpdates:^{
    [collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
} completion:^(BOOL finished) {
    [UIView setAnimationsEnabled:YES];
}];

Edit:

I have also found that if you wrap performBatchUpdates in a UIView animation block, the UIView animation is used instead of the default animation, so you can just set the animation duration to 0, like so:

[UIView animateWithDuration:0 animations:^{
    [collectionView performBatchUpdates:^{
        [collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
    } completion:nil];
}];

This is extra cool if you want to use iOS 7 springy animations during inserts and deletes!