Unable to Load an Image from an URL at TKinter

My goal is to display an JPG image from an URL using tkinter python.

This is the stackoverflow link that I used as a reference. But when I try to run the code, I have received a bunch of error such as:

• KeyError: b’R0l…….
• AttributeError: ‘PhotoImage’ object has no attribute ‘_PhotoImage__photo’

Does anyone have the solution to this?

This is the code:

import tkinter as tk
from PIL import Image, ImageTk
from urllib.request import urlopen
import base64

root = tk.Tk()

URL = "http://www.universeofsymbolism.com/images/ram-spirit-animal.jpg"
u = urlopen(URL)
raw_data = u.read()
u.close()


b64_data = base64.encodestring(raw_data)
photo = ImageTk.PhotoImage(b64_data)

label = tk.Label(image=photo)
label.image = photo
label.pack()

root.mainloop()

Answer

The first error is not specifying the data parameter within ImageTk.PhotoImage(data=b64_data). However, I’m unsure why PhotoImage is unable to read base64 data.

A workaround would be to use BytesIO from the io module. You can pass in the raw data you read from the image into a BytesIO, open it in Image and then pass that into PhotoImage.

I found the code for opening the image from here.

import tkinter as tk
from PIL import Image, ImageTk
from urllib2 import urlopen
from io import BytesIO

root = tk.Tk()

URL = "http://www.universeofsymbolism.com/images/ram-spirit-animal.jpg"
u = urlopen(URL)
raw_data = u.read()
u.close()

im = Image.open(BytesIO(raw_data))
photo = ImageTk.PhotoImage(im)

label = tk.Label(image=photo)
label.image = photo
label.pack()

root.mainloop()

If anybody has a better answer as to why the encoding fails, it would be a more appropriate answer to this question.