How to open an image editor window and display an image file in it?

Question

I'm looking to open a new image editor window and display a new image from a file in it -- all via python script. What is the best way to do this? Searched but only found how to load and display an image, but not how to do it in a separate window. Thanks.

Answer 1

Blender does not support creating a new window officially. However, there are some workarounds.

bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show()

One way is to open up a new User Preferences window and change its Area.type to 'IMAGE_EDITOR' using bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show() operator:

# Call user prefs window
bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show('INVOKE_DEFAULT')
# Change area type
area = bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].screen.areas[0]
area.type = 'IMAGE_EDITOR'

bpy.ops.screen.area_dupli()

Another way is using bpy.ops.screen.area_dupli(), which creates a new window from a specific area of your screen. Find an area of interest, store the Area.type, set it to 'IMAGE_EDITOR' call the the opeator and reset the area:

Blender 3.2+

import bpy
from bpy import context
Iterate through the areas
for area in context.screen.areas:
    if area.type in ('IMAGE_EDITOR', 'VIEW_3D', 'NODE_EDITOR'):
        old_area = area.type        # Store current area type
        area.type = 'IMAGE_EDITOR'  # Set the area to the Image editor
        with context.temp_override(area=area):  # Override the area member
            bpy.ops.screen.area_dupli('INVOKE_DEFAULT')
        area.type = old_area        # Restore the old area
        break 

Blender 2.8+

# Copy context member
context = bpy.context.copy()
Iterate through the areas
for area in bpy.context.screen.areas:
    if area.type in ('IMAGE_EDITOR', 'VIEW_3D', 'NODE_EDITOR'):
        old_area = area.type        # Store current area type
        area.type = 'IMAGE_EDITOR'  # Set the area to the Image editor
        context['area'] = area      # Override the area member
        bpy.ops.screen.area_dupli(context, 'INVOKE_DEFAULT')
        area.type = old_area        # Restore the old area
        break 

Assigning the image

In order to display an image in that window, just load an image and assign its data block it to SpaceImageEditor.image eg using the active space: bpy.context.area.spaces.active.image = image. Complete example using the code to generate an image from: Is it possible to create image data and save to a file from a script?:

size = 640, 480
image = bpy.data.images.new("MyImage", width=size[0], height=size[1])
pixels = [None] * size[0] * size[1]
for x in range(size[0]):
    for y in range(size[1]):
        # assign RGBA to something useful
        r = x / size[0]
        g = y / size[1]
        b = (1 - r) * g
        a = 1.0
    pixels[(y * size[0]) + x] = [r, g, b, a]


pixels = [chan for px in pixels for chan in px]
image.pixels = pixels
Call user prefs window
bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show('INVOKE_DEFAULT')
Change area type
area = bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].screen.areas[0]
area.type = 'IMAGE_EDITOR'
Assign the image
bpy.context.area.spaces.active.image = image

Note: bpy.ops.render.view_show("INVOKE_DEFAULT") might be interesting as well.