At the bottom of the “tkinter” doc page it mentions the “data” option is available. However I was unable to get it to work well when passing a plain bytes() string in. It seems the bytes() string gets interpreted as UTF-8 somewhere along the line, although the underlying TCL library apparenly handles byte strings fine itself. Passing binary GIF and PNG data in Python would usually produce strange exceptions, crashes, and blank images for me.

I found this message with a simple patch which might be useful, though I’m not familiar with the code involved to understand the implications:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/tkinter-discuss/2012-April/003108.html

Even if that fix is not appropriate, can I suggest adding to the documentation to say the data should be encoded with one of these options that seem to work? The Base-64 one is probably better.

PhotoImage(data=data.decode("latin-1).encode("utf-8"))
PhotoImage(data=base64.encodebytes(data))

All works to me.

>>> import tkinter
>>> b = tkinter.Button()
>>> with open('Lib/test/imghdrdata/python.gif', 'rb') as f: data = f.read()
... 
>>> img = tkinter.PhotoImage(data=data)
>>> b['image'] = img
>>> b.pack()

Could you please provide an example which demonstrates the issue?

Thanks for looking at this. Originally the issue was found by reading the GIF and PNG images on various web pages, such as <http://www.weatherzone.com.au/vic/north-central/castlemaine\>. However I was also able to produce the problem with the other formats of that Python logo:

$ python3 -Wall -bt
Python 3.4.1 (default, May 19 2014, 17:40:19) 
[GCC 4.9.0 20140507 (prerelease)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tkinter; tk = tkinter.Tk(); text = tkinter.Text(tk); text.pack()
>>> with open("/lib/python3.4/test/imghdrdata/python.png", "rb") as file: data = file.read()
... 
>>> image = tkinter.PhotoImage(format="png", data=data)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tkinter/__init__.py", line 3384, in __init__
    Image.__init__(self, 'photo', name, cnf, master, **kw)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tkinter/__init__.py", line 3340, in __init__
    self.tk.call(('image', 'create', imgtype, name,) + options)
_tkinter.TclError: CRC check failed
>>> u8png = tkinter.PhotoImage(format="png", data=data.decode("latin-1").encode("utf-8"))
>>> text.image_create(tkinter.END, image=u8png)
'pyimage2'

The same problem occurs with the PGM and PPM logos, and the Base-64 encoding trick does not work with those; only UTF-8 encoding. However as you discovered, the GIF format logo works no problem when passed unencoded, although it continues to work if I use my UTF-8 encoding trick, which is a bit strange. Perhaps the internal UTF-8 decoding step is passing the invalid UTF-8 straight through?

Here is a patch which fixes passing Python bytes to Tcl in Python 3. However it will be not easy to fix this issue in Python 2.

See also bpo-21605 which adds tests for Tkinter images (some of them fails without this patch).

Unfortunately we can't use this straightforward and universal solution in Python 2. Here is a patch which adds special workarounds to fix this issue in 2.7.

I will try test the problem and fix on Windows within a day.

The 3.4 patch looks fine, please apply.

I'm -1 on the 2.7 patch. I think it would be better to add a _tkinter helper function to create Tcl byte array objects. Alternatively, the "binary format" command might help. OTOH, I don't care about 2.7, so feel free to do whatever you consider appropriate.

New changeset 9474f2971855 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch '3.4':
Issue bpo-21580: Now Tkinter correctly handles bytes arguments passed to Tk.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/9474f2971855

New changeset b9d249316f29 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch 'default':
Issue bpo-21580: Now Tkinter correctly handles bytes arguments passed to Tk.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/b9d249316f29

Thank you Martin for your reviews. Here is updated 2.7 patch which implements your suggestion.

The disadvantage of this patch in comparison with first version is that it will not work with statically compiled embedded Python, when only stdlib is updated. I once broke re in bugfix release in such manner (by moving one constant from Python sources to C sources). On other hand, it is very unlikely that anyone uses Tkinter in such circumstances, and in any case this part of code is broken for now, so patch should not introduce new regression.

The 2.7_2 patch looks good to me. I won't rule on the backwards compatibility implications, although I agree that this is unlikely to cause a regression (it would only if somebody updated the standard library only, *and* would use data= for PhotoImage). I'm unsure whether it was possible at all so far to use data= (with whatever argument); if you could have passed a non-buffer object successfully, this would break now.

New changeset 818989a48e96 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch '2.7':
Issue bpo-21580: Now Tkinter correctly handles binary "data" and "maskdata"
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/818989a48e96