The goal is simple: have a super-large image (larger than the window) automatically scroll across a Python-generated GUI window. I already have the code created to generate spectrograph images in realtime, now I just need a way to have them displayed in realtime. At first I tried moving the coordinates of my images and even generating new images with create_image(), but everything I did resulted in a tacky “flickering” effect (not to mention it was slow). Thankfully I found that self.canv.move(self.imgtag,-1,0) can move a specific item (self.imgtag) by a specified amount and it does it smoothly (without flickering). Here’s some sample code. Make sure “snip.bmp” is a big image in the same folder as this script

from Tkinter import *
import Image, ImageTk

class scrollingImage(Frame):

     def go(self):
		self.canv.move(self.imgtag,-1,0)
		self.canv.update()
		self.after(100,self.go)

     def __init__(self, parent=None):
		Frame.__init__(self, parent)
		self.master.title("Spectrogram Viewer")
		self.pack(expand=YES, fill=BOTH)
		self.canv = Canvas(self, relief=SUNKEN)
		self.canv.config(width=200, height=200)
		self.canv.config(highlightthickness=0)

		sbarV = Scrollbar(self, orient=VERTICAL)
		sbarH = Scrollbar(self, orient=HORIZONTAL)

		sbarV.config(command=self.canv.yview)
		sbarH.config(command=self.canv.xview)

		self.canv.config(yscrollcommand=sbarV.set)
		self.canv.config(xscrollcommand=sbarH.set)

		sbarV.pack(side=RIGHT, fill=Y)
		sbarH.pack(side=BOTTOM, fill=X)

		self.canv.pack(side=LEFT, expand=YES, fill=BOTH)
		self.im=Image.open("./snip.bmp")
		width,height=self.im.size
		#self.canv.config(scrollregion=(0,0,width,height))
		self.canv.config(scrollregion=(0,0,300,300))
		self.im2=ImageTk.PhotoImage(self.im)
		x,y=0,0
		self.imgtag=self.canv.create_image(x,y,\
		     anchor="nw",image=self.im2)
		self.go()

scrollingImage().mainloop()

Alternatively, I found a way to accomplish a similar thing with PyGame. I’ve decided not to use PyGame for my software package however, because it’s too specific and can’t be run well alongside Tk windows, and it would be insanely hard to add scrollbars to the window. However it’s extremely effective at scrolling images smoothly. Anyhow, here’s the code:

import pygame
from PIL import Image

im=Image.open("1hr_original.jpg")
graphic = pygame.image.fromstring(im.tostring(),im.size,im.mode)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
running = 1
x,y=0,0
while running:
   clock.tick(30)
   for event in pygame.event.get():    #get user input
      if event.type == pygame.QUIT:    #if user clicks the close X
           running = 0                 #make running 0 to break out of loop
   screen.blit(graphic, (x, y))
   pygame.display.flip()   #Update screen
   x-=1