The problem there being that few people are going to see JLabel in a class list and think "oh, that must be something to do with my image-related needs!" Especi

The problem there being that few people are going to see JLabel in a class list and think "oh, that must be something to do with my image-related needs!" Especially if they've used other GUI tookits, which as far as my experience goes use "label" exclusively to mean "some static text". In Tcl/Tk you would also use a label to display your image with. Tk was one of the most popular toolkits at the time Swing was designed.