UIImageView - How to get the file name of the image assigned?

you can use setAccessibilityIdentifier method for any subclass of UIView

UIImageView *image ;
[image setAccessibilityIdentifier:@"file name"] ;

NSString *file_name = [image accessibilityIdentifier] ;

No no no… in general these things are possible. It'll just make you feel like a dirty person. If you absolutely must, do this:

• Create a category with your own implementation of +imageNamed:(NSString*)imageName that calls through to the existing implementation and uses the technique identified here (How do I use objc_setAssociatedObject/objc_getAssociatedObject inside an object?) to permanently associate imageName with the UIImage object that is returned.

• Use Method Swizzling to swap the provided implementation of imageNamed: for your implementation in the method lookup table of the Objective-C runtime.

• Access the name you associated with the UIImage instance (using objc_getAssociatedObject) anytime you want it.

I can verify that this works, with the caveat that you can't get the names of UIImage's loaded in NIBs. It appears that images loaded from NIBs are not created through any standard function calls, so it's really a mystery to me.

I'm leaving the implementation up to you. Copy-pasting code that screws with the Objective-C runtime is a very bad idea, so think carefully about your project's needs and implement this only if you must.

Nope. You can't do that.

The reason is that a UIImageView instance does not store an image file. It stores a displays a UIImage instance. When you make an image from a file, you do something like this:

UIImage *picture = [UIImage imageNamed:@"myFile.png"];

Once this is done, there is no longer any reference to the filename. The UIImage instance contains the data, regardless of where it got it. Thus, the UIImageView couldn't possibly know the filename.

Also, even if you could, you would never get filename info from a view. That breaks MVC.