UIButton doesn't listen to content mode settin

Question

firstButton is a UIButton of type Custom. I'm programmatically putting three of them across each cell of a table, thusly:

[firstButton setImage:markImage forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[firstButton setContentMode:UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];
[cell.contentView addSubview:firstButton];

Elsewhere, I'm telling it to clipToBounds. What I get is a crop of the center square of the image, rather than an aspect-scaled rendering of it. I've tried this lots of ways, including setting the mode property on firstButton.imageView, which also doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

If anyone looking for answer that work in iOS 6 and iOS 7 and storyboard:

You can set image in your storyboard:

And then:

for(UIView* testId in self.subviews) {
    if([testId isKindOfClass:[UIImageView class]])
        [testId setContentMode:UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFill];
}

Answer 2

If the UIButton does not seem to listen to the layout constraint settings, do check whether the images are larger than the button size. Always use the @2x and @3x images for retina resolutions.

Answer 3

After a couple of hours of confusion, here's how I got it to work under iOS 3.2. As dusker mentioned, using setBackgroundImage instead of setImage did the job for me.

CGRect myButtonFrame = CGRectMake(0, 0, 250, 250);
UIImage *myButtonImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"buttonImage"];

UIButton *myButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];

[myButton setBackgroundImage:myButtonImage forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[myButton setFrame: myButtonFrame];
[myButton setContentMode: UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];

Answer 4

Only solution which worked for me:

[button setImage:image forState:UIControlStateNormal];
button.imageView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFill;
button.contentHorizontalAlignment = UIControlContentHorizontalAlignmentFill;
button.contentVerticalAlignment = UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentFill;

Answer 5

In trying to figure this out, my method got a bit hackier as time went on, and I wound up subclassing UIButton and overriding setHighlighted:

For me it works to just knock down the image alpha to .5, because they're on a black background.

However, it only works if I comment out [super setHighlighted:] (where it appears the image-stretchy code is going on), which just doesn't feel like the right way to solve this at all...everything seems to be working fine, though. We'll see how it holds up as I keep working on it.

- (void)setHighlighted:(BOOL)highlight {
    if (highlight) {
        [self.imageView setAlpha:.5];
    }  else {
        [self.imageView setAlpha:1];        
    }

//    [super setHighlighted:highlight];
}

Answer 6

I had the same problem. I see this question is a little old, but I want to provide a clear and correct answer to save other folks (like me) some time when it pops up in their search results.

It took me a bit of searching and experimenting, but I found the solution. Simply set the ContentMode of the "hidden" ImageView that is inside the UIButton.

[[firstButton imageView] setContentMode: UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];
[firstButton setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:imageName] forState:UIControlStateNormal];

Perhaps that's what Dan Ray was alluding to in his accepted answer, but I suspect not.