cv2.imshow() function is opening a window that always says not responding - python opencv

Question

I am trying to run a very simple program. To open and jpg file and display it using the opencv library for python. Initially it all worked fine but now it just opens a window which doesn't show the image but says 'not responding'. I need to go to the task manager and close it!

from numpy import *
import matplotlib as plt
import cv2

img = cv2.imread('amandapeet.jpg')
print img.shape

cv2.imshow('Amanda', img)

Answer 1

You missed one more line:

cv2.waitKey(0)

Then the window shows the image until you press any key on keyboard. Or you can pass as following:

cv2.waitKey(1000)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Here, window shows image for 1000 ms, or 1 second. After that, the window would disappear itself. But in some cases, it won't. So you can forcefully destroy it using cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Please read more tutorials first : http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_tutorials.html

Answer 2

None of the answers here worked in MacOS. The following works:

Just add a cv2.waitKey(1) after cv2.destroyAllWindows().

Example:

import cv2
image = cv2.imread('my_image.jpg')
cv2.imshow('HSV image', hsv_image); cv2.waitKey(0); cv2.destroyAllWindows(); cv2.waitKey(1)