Creating a Carousel View in SwiftUI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Carousel views are a visually engaging way to showcase a series of images or content in your SwiftUI app. In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through the process of building a beautiful carousel view using Swift and SwiftUI. We’ll break down the code into easily digestible chunks, explaining each step along the way.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Project

To get started, create a new SwiftUI project in Xcode. Choose a suitable name and ensure that you select “SwiftUI” as the interface option. This sets the stage for building our carousel view.

Step 2: Preparing Image Assets

Before we dive into code, make sure you have a collection of images ready. In this example, we’ll use images named “uk,” “us,” “germany,” “italy,” “russia,” “spain,” and “estonia.” Add these images to your project’s asset catalog for easy access.

Click to download assets.

Step 3: Defining the ContentView

In SwiftUI, we start by defining the main content view. This view will host our carousel. Let’s create a ContentView that will initialize our AutoScroller with the image names.

ContentView.swift

In this chunk, we create a SwiftUI ContentView that sets up our carousel by passing an array of image names to the AutoScroller.

Step 4: Building the AutoScroller View

The heart of our carousel is the AutoScroller view. Let's start defining this view with its properties.

struct AutoScroller: View {
    var imageNames: [String]
    let timer = Timer.publish(every: 3.0, on: .main, in: .common).autoconnect()
    @State private var selectedImageIndex: Int = 0

Here, we declare the AutoScroller view with properties including imageNames to hold our image names, a timer to manage auto-scrolling, and a @State property for selectedImageIndex to keep track of the currently selected image.

Step 5: Setting up the View Hierarchy

In the code below, I’ve divided the functionalities into blocks and added comments to explain each step. Go through the code, and we will discuss it ahead.

This carousel view isn’t just a static display of images; it’s interactive. Users can manually navigate through images by tapping on navigation dots, and thanks to the timer-based auto-scrolling feature, the carousel provides a dynamic and engaging user experience.

ZStack is used to create a layered hierarchy, and it's essential for building the carousel since we need to overlay various elements like images, navigation dots, and background effects.

I also added VisualEffectBlur to give more better view effects.

Download complete code repository.

As you continue your SwiftUI journey, you’ll discover the immense flexibility and creativity that SwiftUI empowers you with. Building a carousel is just one example of what you can achieve, and we hope this tutorial has provided you with the knowledge and confidence to embark on your own SwiftUI adventures.

So, go ahead, take what you’ve learned here, and create stunning carousels and user interfaces that captivate your users and elevate your app’s user experience. Happy coding!