Implementing drag and drop into a image viewer

Question

Im an intermediate programmer making my own little image viewer. Currently I'm looking into implementing a Drag-and-Drop feature. Ive done some research and have seen that you need to use image icon b/c it is serializable, the code seems pretty complicated. The DnD would be on images dragged to the panel. I have a few questions.

1. what swing component would work best to hold the image?
2. what would be the easiest way to implement this feature?

Answer 1

Implementing drag-and-drop functionality is not that hard

• Start by reading the Swing tutorial
• Create your own TransferHandler as explained here
• Set your TransferHandler on your Swing component
• Check out which DataFlavor is used when dragging your image data (see also the tutorial) and make sure your handler accepts it
• Test it

Answer 2

what swing component would work best to hold the image?

Why not a JLabel?