Your problem is a common one: you're calling Thread.sleep(...)
in a Swing GUI on the event thread and are essentially thus putting the entire GUI to sleep.
Solution: Google the Swing Timer and use this in place of your while loop/Thread.sleep(...)
Also, if the images aren't too big, then consider reading them all in at once (in a background thread), putting them into ImageIcons, and then swapping out a JLabel's ImageIconsand in your Swing Timer.
For example, you could do something like:
ImageIcon[] icons = new ImageIcon[IMAGE_COUNT];
for (int i = 0; i < IMAGE_COUNT; i++) {
BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(...); // read in the appropriate image
// ...... here manipulate the image if desired such as re-size it
icons[i] = new ImageIcon(img); // put it into an icon
}
elsewhere:
int timerDelay = 1000;
new Timer(timerDelay, new ActionListener(){
int count = 0;
@Override
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
if (count < IMAGE_COUNT) {
someLabel.setIcon(icons[count]);
count++;
} else {
// stop the timer
((Timer)e.getSource()).stop();
}
}
}).start();
- Note: code not compiled nor tested and is posted only as a general example of steps to consider.