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Sorry, my previous comment regarding garbage collection
wasn't clear. Consider the following situation: object X
refers to object Y and to an image, and object Y refers to
object X. The image will not be freed until the garbage
collector frees objects X and Y.

We worked through almost precisely this set of issues in
Smalltalk systems at Xerox PARC, and later at ParcPlace
Systems, starting in the early 1970s. Smalltalk, like
Python, started out using only reference counting, and added
garbage collection much later. However, Smalltalk wasn't
trying to interact with a foreign memory management system
at arm's length, as Python is with Tk: in my opinion, it's
very unfortunate that Tkinter makes the existence of the two
separate memory management systems visible to the Python
programmer, with consequences like the ones discussed here.
However, I have to agree with Martin Loewis that it's too
late to change this situation, at least without extending
the existing API.