Question

I would like to load an image in tkinter from a pygame surface and I am having a problem.

This is what I am currently trying:

image= pygame.image.tostring(surf, 'RGB')
tkimage= tkinter.PhotoImage(data= image)
canvas.create_image(0, 0, tkimage)

but I unfortunately get this error:

_tkinter.TclError: couldn't recognize image data

Answer 1

The PhotoImage class can only read GIF and PGM/PPM files, either directly from a file or as base64 encoded string.

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You should use the Python Imaging Library for loading and creating the image for Tk.

Here’s an example:

import pygame
from PIL import Image
import ImageTk
import Tkinter

# load image in pygame
pygame.init()
surf = pygame.image.load('bridge.png')

# export as string / import to PIL
image_str = pygame.image.tostring(surf, 'RGB')         # use 'RGB' to export
w, h      = surf.get_rect()[2:]
image     = Image.fromstring('RGB', (w, h), image_str) # use 'RGB' to import

# create Tk window/widgets
root         = Tkinter.Tk()
tkimage      = ImageTk.PhotoImage(image) # use ImageTk.PhotoImage class instead
canvas       = Tkinter.Canvas(root)

canvas.create_image(0, 0, image=tkimage)
canvas.pack()
root.mainloop()