Display images one by one using Python PIL library

Question

I intend to show a list of images in a directory one by one using Python PIL(i.e close the previous image window before the next image window opens). Here is my code which doesn

Answer 1

PIL.show() calls an external program to display the image, after storing it in a temporary file, could be the GNOME image viewer or even the inline matplotlib if you use iPython notebook.

From what I gather from their documentation PIL here, I see that the only way to do this is, to do a pkill through a os.system() call or a subprocess call.

So you could change your program to something like this :

import os
def show_images(directory):
 for filename in os.listdir(directory):
     path = directory + "/" + filename
     im = Image.open(path)
     im.show()
     os.system('pkill eog') #if you use GNOME Viewer
     im.close()
     time.sleep(5)

If you don't have a necessity to use PIL exclusively, you can try switching to other libraries such as matplotlib for showing, as described here Matplotlib, where a simple call such as plot.close() will close the figure, and plot.clear() will clear the figure

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def show_images(directory):
 for filename in os.listdir(directory):
     path = directory + "/" + filename
     im = Image.open(path)
     plt.imshow(im)
     plt.show()
     plt.clf() #will make the plot window empty
     im.close()
     time.sleep(5)