I'm currently trying to make fancy widgets for Tkinter and for this i made an image collection of 40x50 images (240x240 pixels, RGBA). When i try to load all these images (they are in a pickle file, already containing pillow images), it takes way over a minute for this simple loop to execute, where ImageTk.Photoimage seems to be the bottleneck: imagearray = pickle.load(open(self.GAUGE_UI_FILENAME, "rb")) #40x50 array of 240x240 pixel RGBA images converted_imagelist = [] for imagelist in imagearray: for img in imagelist: converted_imagelist.append(ImageTk.PhotoImage(img, size = (240,240))) self.gauge_images.append(converted_imagelist) converted_imagelist = [] I already tried threading it, but it seems like ImageTk.PhotoImage calls functions of Tkinter which only are allowed to run in the main thread. Am i doing something wrong? Can i somehow prepare the images for tkinter to reduce the startup time? The unpickling of the rather large nested list happens in a split second, but the conversion for tkinter takes ages. After the images are loaded i can cycle through them fine in a reasonable amount of frames per second to display the animations but the execution time of this few lines of code makes me go grab a Tea before the application actually shows the GUI. Continue reading...
