Problem in finding image resources upon deployment

Question

hi. im put used some images in my buttons and everything works smoothly if i run it through netbeans. however, once i try to run the application independently (running the jar file in the dist folder) the image resources cant be found. could anyone pls help point out what im doing wrong here?
my code goes like this:
        ImageIcon iconF = createImageIcon(imagedir + "next.png", "Forward");
        ImageIcon iconForw = new ImageIcon(getScaledImage(iconF.getImage(), 75, 35));
        btnForward.setIcon(iconForw);
    protected ImageIcon createImageIcon(String path, String description) {
        java.net.URL imgURL = getClass().getResource(path);
        if (imgURL != null) {
            return new ImageIcon(imgURL, description);
        } else {
            System.err.println("Couldn't find file: " + path);
            return null;
    private Image getScaledImage(Image srcImg, int w, int h){
        BufferedImage resizedImg = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
        Graphics2D g2 = resizedImg.createGraphics();
        g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_INTERPOLATION,  RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BILINEAR);
        g2.drawImage(srcImg, 0, 0, w, h, null);
        g2.dispose();
        return resizedImg;
    }thanks in advance.

Answer 1

thanks. it was a mistake on me referring to a wrong imagedir; it was used to be imagedir = "../resources/images" which is in a different package of the main class which is in the package thegrid. so i just put a new package thegrid.images and put the images there and changed imagedir = "/images" but i was wondering how should i refer to it if i wanted the images to load from a different package? thanks guys ^^;