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As there appears to be agreement that the current behaviour
cannot be changed, I'd like to propose the attached
image.txt as a patch.

With this patch, people who want to explicitly delete images
need to pass a delete=False option to the image ctor, i.e.

i = Tkinter.PhotoImage(file="fn", delete=0)

Then, when they want to delete the image, they need to call

i.delete()

If that is an acceptable solution, I'll apply it to Python
2.3. In the case of the original report, the image would
become garbage eventually, since the only reference to
delete it was a local variable, which is lost.