How to show PIL images on the screen?

I am doing some image editing with the PIL libary. The point is, that I don't want to save the image each time on my HDD to view it in Explorer. Is there a small module that simply enables me to set up a window and display the image?

Solution 1:

From near the beginning of the PIL Tutorial:

Once you have an instance of the Image class, you can use the methods defined by this class to process and manipulate the image. For example, let's display the image we just loaded:

     >>> im.show()

Update:

Nowadays theImage.show() method is formally documented in the Pillow fork of PIL along with an explanation of how it's implemented on different OSs.

Solution 2:

I tested this and it works fine for me:

from PIL import Image
im = Image.open('image.jpg')
im.show()

Solution 3:

If you find that PIL has problems on some platforms, using a native image viewer may help.

img.save("tmp.png") #Save the image to a PNG file called tmp.png.

For MacOS:

import os
os.system("open tmp.png") #Will open in Preview.

For most GNU/Linux systems with X.Org and a desktop environment:

import os
os.system("xdg-open tmp.png")

For Windows:

import os
os.system("powershell -c tmp.png")

Solution 4:

Maybe you can use matplotlib for this, you can also plot normal images with it. If you call show() the image pops up in a window. Take a look at this:

http://matplotlib.org/users/image_tutorial.html

Solution 5:

You can display an image in your own window using Tkinter, w/o depending on image viewers installed in your system:

import Tkinter as tk
from PIL import Image, ImageTk  # Place this at the end (to avoid any conflicts/errors)

window = tk.Tk()
#window.geometry("500x500") # (optional)    
imagefile = {path_to_your_image_file}
img = ImageTk.PhotoImage(Image.open(imagefile))
lbl = tk.Label(window, image = img).pack()
window.mainloop()

For Python 3, replace import Tkinter as tk with import tkinter as tk.