Including Images with an executable jar

Files in a Jar are not files in the sense of a file on disk. They are simply a (possibly) compressed stream of bytes.

Java makes it easy to extract these “resources” from Jar files through the use of the ClassLoader

background = ImageIO.read(getClass().getResource("/wood.jpeg"));

Should work…

This will return a URL which ImageIO can use to load the resource.

You could also have a read of

• Classpath resource within jar
• Jar get image as resource
• Load a resource in Jar

And I could list some more. So, yeah, it gets asked a lot 😉