I had the same problem when I try to construct a canvas image item for
tkinter from a tkinter PhotoImage. The latter was constructed from some
image data in memory (in my case an opencv image). The same exception
occurs if I simply try to convert the PhotoImage to a string.
I guess there is a bug in the conversion method __str__
of the PhotoImage,
making it simply returns the image source. If constructed from a file name
(see below) this works fine. If constructed from some image data, this is not
of type string and yields an exception.
Unfortunately, using the compatible PhotoImage from PIL's
ImageTk module like matsjoyce suggested didn't help me either because I experienced an even worse problem, probably a platform or library version dependent bug (I used OS X 10.11.6, python 3.5, tkinter 8.6, PIL 1.1.7): Now the python script crashed at the construction of the canvas image item with a "Bus Error".
The only workaround I am aware of was to store the image data into a temporary file and use a tkinter PhotoImage constructed from that file name. (Trying the same with the PIL PhotoImage still crashes.)
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import tkinter
import tempfile
import cv2
def opencv2photoimg(opencv_img):
"""Convert OpenCV (numpy) image to tkinter photo image."""
# ugly workaround: store as file & load file, because direct
# construction leads to a crash on my platform
tmpfile = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.png', delete=True)
# ^^^ I am using PNGs only, you might want to use another suffix
cv2.imwrite(tmpfile.name, opencv_img)
return tkinter.PhotoImage(file=tmpfile.name)
# load image
img = cv2.imread('test.png')
# do something w/ the image ...
# setup tk window w/ canvas containing an image
root = tkinter.Tk()
canvas = tkinter.Canvas(root, width=img.shape[1], height=img.shape[0])
canvas.pack()
# keep reference to PhotoImage to avoid it being garbage collected
# (well known tkinter bug for canvas image items)
photo_img = opencv2photoimg(img)
# create a canvas item
img_item = canvas.create_image(0, 0, anchor=tkinter.NW, image=photo_img)
# display the window
tkinter.mainloop()
I do not think it's elegant, but it works.