You don’t have to encode it. Simply make a NSUrl, it knows the “data:”-url.
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:base64String];
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:url];
UIImage *ret = [UIImage imageWithData:imageData];
As mentioned in the comments, you have to make sure that you prepend your data with data:image/png;base64,
or else your base64 data is useless.