To display an image

As suggested in the article Concurrency in Swing, your button handler’s query may be blocking the event dispatch thread. Using javax.swing.SwingWorker is one approach to loading images in the background, while displaying progress and keeping the GUI thread alive.

Addendum: Here’s a sscce that loads the SO logo; it’s been updated to handle exceptions and resize the enclosing container to fit the loaded image:

import java.awt.*;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import javax.swing.*;

/**
 * @see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4530659
 */
public final class WorkerTest extends JFrame {

    private final JLabel label = new JLabel("Loading...");

    public WorkerTest() {
        this.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        label.setHorizontalTextPosition(JLabel.CENTER);
        label.setVerticalTextPosition(JLabel.BOTTOM);
        this.add(label);
        this.pack();
        this.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
    }

    private void start() {
        new ImageWorker().execute();
    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {

            @Override
            public void run() {
                WorkerTest wt = new WorkerTest();
                wt.setVisible(true);
                wt.start();
            }
        });
    }

    class ImageWorker extends SwingWorker<Image, Void> {

        private static final String TEST
            = "http://cdn.sstatic.net/stackexchange/img/logos/so/so-logo.png";

        @Override
        protected Image doInBackground() throws IOException {
            Image image = ImageIO.read(new URL(TEST));
            return image.getScaledInstance(640, -1, Image.SCALE_SMOOTH);
        }

        @Override
        protected void done() {
            try {
                ImageIcon icon = new ImageIcon(get());
                label.setIcon(icon);
                label.setText("Done");
                WorkerTest.this.pack();
                WorkerTest.this.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
            } catch (InterruptedException | ExecutionException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}