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It seems behavior I witnessed in my program earlier this week is due to something else, the SSCCE using only layout managers failed to resize the image
sorry for the rabbit chase knightmetal!

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My experience is if you tell the image to be added inside a boarderlayout/Center it has demands on the object for resizing, and will demand it to be a certain size, so rethinking it, you would need...

EDIT:
the order you add things makes a difference too.

add(panel);
panel.add(label, BorderLayout.CENTER);

repaint();
panel.repaint();

can probably be shortened to just reversing the...

well if your image is inside your resizable frame, I would suggest to try giving your frame the BorderLayout, then add your image to the center area.
(do a search on BorderLayout for cut and paste...