According to the UIImage documentation:

In low-memory situations, image data may be purged from a UIImage object to free up memory on the system.

Does anyone know how this works? It appears that this process is completely transparent and will occur in the background with no input from me, but I can't find any definitive documentation one way or the other.

Second, will this data-purge occur when the image is not loaded by me? (I'm getting the image from UIImagePicker).

Here's the situation: I'm taking a picture with the UIImagePickerController and and immediately taking that image and sending it to a new UIViewController for display. Sending the raw image to the new controller crashes my app with memory warnings about 30% of the time. Resizing the image takes a few moments, time that I'd rather not spend if there's a 3rd option available to me.