🔒 tkinter refuses to draw my image on a canvas

[lament magnet]

I have been really annoyed by this issue but it just isnt working. I am trying to put the camera feed on a tkinter canvas using cv2 but it just doesnt want to show
here is the code:

    canvas = tk.Canvas(root, width=vp.frame_size[0], height=vp.frame_size[1], background='gray75')

    cv_img = cv2.cvtColor(cap.read()[1], cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)
    photo = PIL.ImageTk.PhotoImage(image = PIL.Image.fromarray(cv_img))

    # Add a PhotoImage to the Canvas
    canvas.create_image(0, 0, image=photo, anchor=tk.NW)
    canvas.pack(pady=20)

but it just shows the "gray75" background
any ideas?

[hallow hearth]

@lament magnet

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[elfin axle]

is this in a function/method? to my knowledge, you always need to keep a reference to any PhotoImage instance you create, otherwise they'll get garbage collected and tkinter can't display them

[lament magnet]

😭

yeah thats it

took too long

[magic gorge]

Really? Because the canvas should hold a reference now, should it not? I was going to suggest a call to canvas.update() at the end.

[near estuary]

tkinter is cursed and the canvas won't hold a proper reference. Something else needs to keep the ref alive

[shrewd ruin]

Tkinter always has this kind of issues, in the past I found that using a list as a "cache" in the global scope solved issue with the references.

[hallow hearth]

Python help channel closed

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