Tkinter image not showing or giving an error

Question

I have tried two different things to try to get an image to show in a label

#This gives " TclError: couldn't recognize data in image file "TestImage.gif" "
imgPath = "TestImage.gif"
photo = PhotoImage(file = imgPath)
label = Label(image = photo)
label.image = photo # keep a reference!
label.grid(row = 3, column = 1, padx = 5, pady = 5)

and

#This gives no error but the image doesn't show
imgPath = "TestImage.gif"
photo = PhotoImage(imgPath)
label = Label(image = photo)
label.image = photo # keep a reference!
label.grid(row = 3, column = 1, padx = 5, pady = 5)

The image is in the same folder as all the code. Any suggestions on how to show an image?

Answer 1

Bryan Oakley is correct, the image is not a jpg in terms of its content, even though your filesystem thinks it's a gif.

On my end I tried opening a jpg with your program and got the same error 'TclError: couldn't recognize data in image file "hello.jpg".'

So you can do this: Open your image with mspaint, then go to File > Save As and from the "Save As Type" dropdown, choose GIF. Then the code should work. This is what I used:

from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()

imgPath = r"hello.gif"
photo = PhotoImage(file = imgPath)
label = Label(image = photo)
label.image = photo # keep a reference!
label.grid(row = 3, column = 1, padx = 5, pady = 5)

root.mainloop()

(btw, if I changed line 7 above to photo = PhotoImage(imgPath) then like you, no image appears. So leave it as photo = PhotoImage(file = imgPath))