I think, creating endles GestureRecognizer instances isn’t the best practice.
The cell class should handle it’s UI interaction itself. What means: Keep the cells logic inside the cell class. CellForRowAtIndexPath is Controller logic and should be separated from the cell.
Could you extract and post a small example project?
I’ll take a look on it and try to find a good solution.
I’m planning to add an UITableView community example shorty. It will contain many technics around the UITableView. I’ll add my “cell image tap solution” to that demo too.