When I try to use

Toolkit kit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
Image img = kit.getImage("myimage.jpg");
w = img.getWidth(null);
h = img.getHeight(null);

Then the width and height is returned as being 0. Is this caused by the
getWidth and getHeight methods needing an ImageObserver as parameter? I
haven't grasped the concept of ImageObservers. When I used an applet I
could pass that one as the argument, but in the application I don't know
how it all fits together.

I should mention that I don't need to show the image (for now). I just
want to load an image into an Image object and later extract the pixels
of the Image object into an array of integers. Swing is related to user
interfaces (as far as I know), but since I don't really even want a user
interface for now, I don't see why I need to look into the Swing package
in order to load image data. This is why I'm confused.

I have written many applications, including ones with Swing interfaces,
but handling images in applications happen still to confuse me.

Is there not any complete example (with code) on the net of an
application that loads an image from disc and into an Image object? I
know it's very simple, but I just haven't managed to get it to work.

Rune
--
http://runevision.com