If you're running a slide show you'd usually have a nice transition animation between each of the images. As you say, you also want to pause, manually skip, etc.
Using a single image view won't necessarily work well for that. You may want to have 2 image views and use them in tandem (fading or moving in and out of the screen).
SDWebImage is able to download the image in the background for you (SDWebImageDownloader.sharedDownloader
) so you can easily decouple the downloading from your slide show animation.
NSTimer
is suitable for running your slideshow. You can start and invalidate it as required. The method that runs to move to the next image can also be run explicitly is required.
So, what you want isn't image view animation. It's a slideshow components, which happens to be implemented with a (couple of) image view(s).
That all said, leverage existing code: search CocoaControls.