You used the ImageIcon class to create an icon from an image file and the setIcon method or the constructor to place the image in a GUI component, such as a button and a label. For example, the following statements create an ImageIcon and set it on an JLabel object jlbl.

ImageIcon imageIcon = new ImageIcon("c:\\book\\image\\us.gif");
jlbl.setIcon(imageIcon);

This approach suffers a problem. The file location is fixed since it uses the absolute file path on Window. Thus, the program cannot run on other platforms and cannot run as applet.