Available React Native 0.14+. If you've generated your project with 0.13 or earlier, read this. The new asset system relies on build hooks for Xcode and Gradle that are included in new projects generated with react-native init. If you generated your projects before that, you'll have to manually add them to your projects to use the new images asset system. See Upgrading for instructions on how to do this.
If you are building a hybrid app (some UIs in React Native, some UIs in platform code) you can still use images that are already bundled into the app (via Xcode asset catalogs or Android drawable folder):
Note that this approach provides no safety checks. It's up to you to guarantee that those images are available in the application. Also you have to specify image dimensions manually.
Many of the images you will display in your app will not be available at compile time, or you will want to load some dynamically to keep the binary size down. Unlike with static resources, you will need to manually specify the dimensions of your image.
Note that image sources required this way include size (width, height) info for the Image. If you need to scale the image dynamically (i.e. via flex), you may need to manually set { width: undefined, height: undefined } on the style attribute.
Available React Native 0.14+. If you've generated your project with 0.13 or earlier, read this. The new asset system relies on build hooks for Xcode and Gradle that are included in new projects generated with react-native init. If you generated your projects before that, you'll have to manually add them to your projects to use the new images asset system. See Upgrading for instructions on how to do this.
If you are building a hybrid app (some UIs in React Native, some UIs in platform code) you can still use images that are already bundled into the app (via Xcode asset catalogs or Android drawable folder):
Note that this approach provides no safety checks. It's up to you to guarantee that those images are available in the application. Also you have to specify image dimensions manually.
Many of the images you will display in your app will not be available at compile time, or you will want to load some dynamically to keep the binary size down. Unlike with static resources, you will need to manually specify the dimensions of your image.