Python Imaging Library (Fork)

Pillow is the "friendly" PIL fork by Alex Clark and Contributors. PIL is the Python Imaging Library by Fredrik Lundh and Contributors.

The full documentation is hosted at http://pillow.readthedocs.org/. It contains everything in this file plus tutorials, reference, compatibility details, and more.

The fork author's goal is to foster active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via Travis CI
• Publicized development activity on GitHub
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index
• Solicitation for community contributions and involvement on Image-SIG

For information about why this fork exists and how it differs from PIL, see the About page in the documentation.

You can install Pillow with pip:

$ pip install Pillow

Or easy_install (for installing Python Eggs, as pip does not support them):

$ easy_install Pillow

Or download the compressed archive from PyPI, extract it, and inside it run:

$ python setup.py install

For more information, please see http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ or below.

PIL needs you! Please help us maintain the Python Imaging Library here:

• GitHub (https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow)
• Freenode (irc://irc.freenode.net#pil)
• Image-SIG (http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/image-sig)

Pillow is a volunteer effort led by Alex Clark. If you can't help with development, please help us financially; your assistance is very much needed and appreciated!

Many of Pillow's features require external libraries:

• libjpeg provides JPEG functionality.
  • Pillow has been tested with libjpeg versions 6b, 8, and 9
• zlib provides access to compressed PNGs
• libtiff provides group4 tiff functionality
  • Pillow has been tested with libtiff versions 3.x and 4.0
• libfreetype provides type related services
• littlecms provides color management
• libwebp provides the Webp format.
  • Pillow has been tested with version 0.1.3, which does not read transparent webp files. Version 0.3.0 supports transparency.
• tcl/tk provides support for tkinter bitmap and photo images.

If the prerequisites are installed in the standard library locations for your machine (e.g. /usr or /usr/local), no additional configuration should be required. If they are installed in a non-standard location, you may need to configure setuptools to use those locations (i.e. by editing setup.py and/or setup.cfg). Once you have installed the prerequisites, run:

$ pip install Pillow

We do not provide binaries for Linux. If you didn't build Python from source, make sure you have Python's development libraries installed. In Debian or Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools

Or for Python 3:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-setuptools

Prerequisites are installed on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with:

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg62-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev

Prerequisites are installed with on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or Raspian Wheezy 7.0 with:

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev

Additionally, many Linux distributions now include Pillow (instead of PIL) with their distribution:

• Fedora
• Debian/Ubuntu
• ArchLinux

We do not provide binaries for OS X. So you'll need XCode to install Pillow. (XCode 4.2 on 10.6 will work with the Official Python binary distribution. Otherwise, use whatever XCode you used to compile Python.)

The easiest way to install the prerequisites is via Homebrew. After you install Homebrew, run:

$ brew install libtiff libjpeg webp littlecms

If you've built your own Python, then you should be able to install Pillow using:

$ pip install Pillow

We provide binaries for Windows in the form of Python Eggs and Python Wheels:

$ easy_install Pillow

$ pip install --use-wheel Pillow

Current platform support for Pillow is documented here: http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html#platform-support