Python is unable to read file

[deanhystad]

You should create a folder where you want to work on your project. On windows you might create a pygame_tutorial folder in your Documents folder. In this folder you would put your Untitled.jpeg (and give it a better name), other image files, and your python file(s). Now, when you want to work on the pygame_tutorial, just open Documents\pygame_tutorial. I have a shortcut to Documents on my desktop, so it would just be a couple of clicks.

You always want to have support files in the same folder as your program file(s). This lets you use relative paths instead of hardcoded paths. In your example, you should not have the full path for the image file encoded in the python file. You could use a relative path, but that forces you to change to the directory before running your program. I like programs to be independent of their file location, and python makes this easy.

import pygame
from pathlib import Path

WIDTH, HEIGHT = 1000, 800
WIN = pygame.display.set_mode((WIDTH, HEIGHT))
pygame.display.set_caption('Asteroid Dodge')
HOME = Path(__file__).parent
BG = pygame.image.load(HOME / "Unkown.jpeg")

Each python module has a variable named __file__ that is the full filename for the file. This can be used to get the home folder for the file. In the code above I use the HOME path to load the background image, which I know resides in the same folder as my python file.