how to open an image by giving path?

I wrote a program where I get the pixel data from a gif image. for loading the image and getting an image object, i used this statement.

URL url = new URL("http://www.wizard.ca/pics/all_roads_desktop_800x600.gif");
Image m_image= Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(url);

Is there any other way by which i can create an image object just by giving general path like "d:\pictures\all_roads_desktop_800x600.gif" instead of an url?

The usual way to opening image files is the javax.imageio.ImageIO.read method, which returns a BufferedImage object.