JPanel removeAll doesn't get rid of previous components

Question

I have a swing application in which I display images in a JPanel. If the app is unable to produce the image I want to remove the previous one from the JPanel and replace it

Answer 1

As you are dealing with unpredictable latency, use a SwingWorker to do the loading in the background, as shown here. The example uses pack() to resize the label to that of the image, but you may want to use a fixed-size grid and scale the images, as shown here.