Show an animated BG in Swing

Question

An animated (cycling) GIF can be displayed in a JLabel or in HTML (in formatted text components like JEditorPane) and be seen to cycle.

But to load an image to paint as the background of a container, I would typically use either ImageIO.read() or Toolkit.getImage() (the latter when I'm feeling nostalgic for the last millennium). Neither method of loading an image results in a cycling image, it is typically just the first frame.

How to load an animated image for a background?

E.G.

Answer 1

Using ImageIcon is probably the most straightforward thing to do. A couple of things to keep in mind:

• ImageIcon(URL) itself makes use of Toolkit.getImage(URL). You may prefer using Toolkit.createImage(URL) instead - getImage() may use cached or shared image data.

• ImageIcon makes use of a MediaTracker to effectively wait until the image is completely loaded.

So, your issue may not be the use of Toolkit (ImageIO is a different beast), but rather the fact that you're not rendering a fully loaded image. One interesting thing to try would be:

Image image = f.getToolkit().createImage(url);
//...
ImagePanel imagePanel = new ImagePanel(image);
imagePanel.prepareImage(image, imagePanel);
//...

My Swing/AWT/J2D may be a bit fuzzy, but the idea is that since your ImagePanel is an ImageObserver, it can be notified asynchronously about image information. The Component.imageUpdate() method should invoke repaint as needed.

Edit:

As noted in the comments, the call to prepareImage is not required - a working example is included below. The key is that the overridden paintComponent method invokes Graphics.drawImage, which provides the ImageObserver hook. The imageUpdate method (implemented in java.awt.Component) will continuously be invoked with the ImageObserver.FRAMEBITS flag set.

import java.awt.EventQueue;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.GridLayout;
import java.awt.Image;
import java.awt.image.ImageObserver;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.border.EmptyBorder;

public class ImagePanel extends JPanel {

    private final Image image;

    public ImagePanel(Image image) {
        super();
        this.image = image;
    }

    @Override
    protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        super.paintComponent(g);
        g.drawImage(this.image, 0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight(), this);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException {
        final URL url = new URL("https://i.sstatic.net/iQFxo.gif");
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                JFrame f = new JFrame("Image");
                f.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
                f.setLocationByPlatform(true);

                Image image = f.getToolkit().createImage(url);
                ImagePanel imagePanel = new ImagePanel(image);
                imagePanel.setLayout(new GridLayout(5, 10, 10, 10));
                imagePanel.setBorder(new EmptyBorder(20, 20, 20, 20));
                for (int ii = 1; ii < 51; ii++) {
                    imagePanel.add(new JButton("" + ii));
                }

                f.setContentPane(imagePanel);
                f.pack();
                f.setVisible(true);
            }
        });
    }
}