I've spent some time looking online and so far haven't found anything that answers this without using PIL, which i can't get to work is there another way to do this simply?
3 Answers
tkinter has a PhotoImage class which can be used to display GIF images. If you want other formats (other than the rather outdated PGM/PPM formats) you'll need to use something like PIL or Pillow.
import Tkinter as tk
root = tk.Tk()
image = tk.PhotoImage(file="myfile.gif")
label = tk.Label(image=image)
label.pack()
root.mainloop()
It's important to note that if you move this code into a function, you may have problems. The above code works because it runs in the global scope. With a function the image object may get garbage-collected when the function exits, which will cause the label to appear blank.
There's an easy workaround (save a persistent reference to the image object), but the point of the above code is to show the simplest code possible.
For more information see this web page: Why do my Tkinter images not appear?
5 Comments
LuGibs
Thank you this is great, problem was my college wont let extra python modules such as PIL or Pillow to be installed on the system. :)
LuGibs
Sorry, when I tried it in my program it only shows a blank square where I would expect to see the image, so it must open the image as the dimensions are correct but it isn't displaying what is in the image?
LuGibs
Found the adding a line, label.image = image, made the image appear as it kept a reference. This works with .png files too.
Zia
The links are not functional. Kindly update.
Bryan Oakley
@Zia: thanks for alerting me. I've fixed the links.
You can use PIL library which available for python 3.
First, you need to install PIL using this command (using pip):
pip install pillow
then:
`from tkinter import *`
from PIL import Image, ImageTk
`class Window(Frame):`
`def __init__(self, master=None):
Frame.__init__(self, master)
self.master = master
self.pack(fill=BOTH, expand=1)
load = Image.open("parrot.jpg")
render = ImageTk.PhotoImage(load)
img = Label(self, image=render)
img.image = render
img.place(x=0, y=0)`
Comments
Luke, this is too late , however may help others. Your image has to be in the same sub directory with .py script. You can also type './imageFileName.png'
1 Comment
Bryan Oakley
This is not true - the image can be anywhere in your filesystem. You just need to give a correct path to the file.
i can't get to work? Do you can't install ? Do you get error message ? image disappears (very common problem) ?