Installation

Warnings

Warning

Pillow and PIL cannot co-exist in the same environment. Before installing Pillow, please uninstall PIL.

Warning

Pillow >= 1.0 no longer supports "import Image". Please use "from PIL import Image" instead.

Warning

Pillow >= 2.1.0 no longer supports "import _imaging". Please use "from PIL.Image import core as _imaging" instead.

Notes

Note

Pillow is supported on the following Python versions

Python	2.4	2.5	2.6	2.7	3.2	3.3	3.4	3.5	3.6	3.7	3.8
Pillow < 2	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 2 - 3			Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 4				Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 5.0 - 5.1				Yes			Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 5.2 - 5.4				Yes			Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 6.0 - 6.2.0				Yes				Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow 6.2.1				Yes				Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pillow >= 7								Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Basic Installation

Note

The following instructions will install Pillow with support for most common image formats. See external-libraries for a full list of external libraries supported.

Install Pillow with pip:

$ pip install Pillow

Windows Installation

We provide Pillow binaries for Windows compiled for the matrix of supported Pythons in both 32 and 64-bit versions in wheel, egg, and executable installers. These binaries have all of the optional libraries included except for raqm and libimagequant:

> pip install Pillow

macOS Installation

We provide binaries for macOS for each of the supported Python versions in the wheel format. These include support for all optional libraries except libimagequant. Raqm support requires libraqm, fribidi, and harfbuzz to be installed separately:

$ pip install Pillow

Linux Installation

We provide binaries for Linux for each of the supported Python versions in the manylinux wheel format. These include support for all optional libraries except libimagequant. Raqm support requires libraqm, fribidi, and harfbuzz to be installed separately:

$ pip install Pillow

Most major Linux distributions, including Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and ArchLinux also include Pillow in packages that previously contained PIL e.g. python-imaging.

FreeBSD Installation

Pillow can be installed on FreeBSD via the official Ports or Packages systems:

Ports:

$ cd /usr/ports/graphics/py-pillow && make install clean

Packages:

$ pkg install py27-pillow

Note

The Pillow FreeBSD port and packages are tested by the ports team with all supported FreeBSD versions and against Python 2.7 and 3.x.

Building From Source

Download and extract the compressed archive from PyPI.

External Libraries

Note

You do not need to install all supported external libraries to use Pillow's basic features. Zlib and libjpeg are required by default.

Note

There are Dockerfiles in our Docker images repo to install the dependencies for some operating systems.

Many of Pillow's features require external libraries:

libjpeg provides JPEG functionality.
- Pillow has been tested with libjpeg versions 6b, 8, 9-9c and libjpeg-turbo version 8.
- Starting with Pillow 3.0.0, libjpeg is required by default, but may be disabled with the --disable-jpeg flag.
zlib provides access to compressed PNGs
- Starting with Pillow 3.0.0, zlib is required by default, but may be disabled with the --disable-zlib flag.
libtiff provides compressed TIFF functionality
- Pillow has been tested with libtiff versions 3.x and 4.0
libfreetype provides type related services
littlecms provides color management
- Pillow version 2.2.1 and below uses liblcms1, Pillow 2.3.0 and above uses liblcms2. Tested with 1.19 and 2.7-2.9.
libwebp provides the WebP format.
- Pillow has been tested with version 0.1.3, which does not read transparent WebP files. Versions 0.3.0 and above support transparency.
tcl/tk provides support for tkinter bitmap and photo images.
openjpeg provides JPEG 2000 functionality.
- Pillow has been tested with openjpeg 2.0.0, 2.1.0 and 2.3.1.
- Pillow does not support the earlier 1.5 series which ships with Debian Jessie.
libimagequant provides improved color quantization
- Pillow has been tested with libimagequant 2.6-2.12.5
- Libimagequant is licensed GPLv3, which is more restrictive than the Pillow license, therefore we will not be distributing binaries with libimagequant support enabled.
- Windows support: Libimagequant requires VS2015/MSVC 19 to compile, so it is unlikely to work with Python 2.7 on Windows.
libraqm provides complex text layout support.
- libraqm provides bidirectional text support (using FriBiDi), shaping (using HarfBuzz), and proper script itemization. As a result, Raqm can support most writing systems covered by Unicode.
- libraqm depends on the following libraries: FreeType, HarfBuzz, FriBiDi, make sure that you install them before installing libraqm if not available as package in your system.
- setting text direction or font features is not supported without libraqm.
- libraqm is dynamically loaded in Pillow 5.0.0 and above, so support is available if all the libraries are installed.
- Windows support: Raqm support is currently unsupported on Windows.

Once you have installed the prerequisites, run:

$ pip install Pillow

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 by editing setup.py or setup.cfg, or by adding environment variables on the command line:

$ CFLAGS="-I/usr/pkg/include" pip install pillow

If Pillow has been previously built without the required prerequisites, it may be necessary to manually clear the pip cache or build without cache using the --no-cache-dir option to force a build with newly installed external libraries.

Build Options

Environment variable: MAX_CONCURRENCY=n. Pillow can use multiprocessing to build the extension. Setting MAX_CONCURRENCY sets the number of CPUs to use, or can disable parallel building by using a setting of 1. By default, it uses 4 CPUs, or if 4 are not available, as many as are present.
Build flags: --disable-zlib, --disable-jpeg, --disable-tiff, --disable-freetype, --disable-lcms, --disable-webp, --disable-webpmux, --disable-jpeg2000, --disable-imagequant. Disable building the corresponding feature even if the development libraries are present on the building machine.
Build flags: --enable-zlib, --enable-jpeg, --enable-tiff, --enable-freetype, --enable-lcms, --enable-webp, --enable-webpmux, --enable-jpeg2000, --enable-imagequant. Require that the corresponding feature is built. The build will raise an exception if the libraries are not found. Webpmux (WebP metadata) relies on WebP support. Tcl and Tk also must be used together.
Build flag: --disable-platform-guessing. Skips all of the platform dependent guessing of include and library directories for automated build systems that configure the proper paths in the environment variables (e.g. Buildroot).
Build flag: --debug. Adds a debugging flag to the include and library search process to dump all paths searched for and found to stdout.

Sample usage:

$ MAX_CONCURRENCY=1 python setup.py build_ext --enable-[feature] install

or using pip:

$ pip install pillow --global-option="build_ext" --global-option="--enable-[feature]"

Building on macOS

The Xcode command line tools are required to compile portions of Pillow. The tools are installed by running xcode-select --install from the command line. The command line tools are required even if you have the full Xcode package installed. It may be necessary to run sudo xcodebuild -license to accept the license prior to using the tools.

The easiest way to install external libraries is via Homebrew. After you install Homebrew, run:

$ brew install libtiff libjpeg webp little-cms2

To install libraqm on macOS use Homebrew to install its dependencies:

$ brew install freetype harfbuzz fribidi

Then see depends/install_raqm_cmake.sh to install libraqm.

Now install Pillow with:

$ pip install Pillow

or from within the uncompressed source directory:

$ python setup.py install

Building on Windows

We don't recommend trying to build on Windows. It is a maze of twisty passages, mostly dead ends. There are build scripts and notes for the Windows build in the winbuild directory.

Building on FreeBSD

Note

Only FreeBSD 10 and 11 tested

Make sure you have Python's development libraries installed.:

$ sudo pkg install python2

Or for Python 3:

$ sudo pkg install python3

Prerequisites are installed on FreeBSD 10 or 11 with:

$ sudo pkg install jpeg-turbo tiff webp lcms2 freetype2 openjpeg harfbuzz fribidi

Then see depends/install_raqm_cmake.sh to install libraqm.

Building on 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

In Fedora, the command is:

$ sudo dnf install python-devel redhat-rpm-config

Or for Python 3:

$ sudo dnf install python3-devel redhat-rpm-config

Note

redhat-rpm-config is required on Fedora 23, but not earlier versions.

Prerequisites are installed on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with:

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev libopenjp2-7-dev zlib1g-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev python-tk \
    libharfbuzz-dev libfribidi-dev

Then see depends/install_raqm.sh to install libraqm.

Prerequisites are installed on recent RedHat Centos or Fedora with:

$ sudo dnf install libtiff-devel libjpeg-devel openjpeg2-devel zlib-devel \
    freetype-devel lcms2-devel libwebp-devel tcl-devel tk-devel \
    harfbuzz-devel fribidi-devel libraqm-devel libimagequant-devel

Note that the package manager may be yum or dnf, depending on the exact distribution.

See also the Dockerfiles in the Test Infrastructure repo (https://github.com/python-pillow/docker-images) for a known working install process for other tested distros.

Building on Android

Basic Android support has been added for compilation within the Termux environment. The dependencies can be installed by:

$ pkg -y install python python-dev ndk-sysroot clang make \
    libjpeg-turbo-dev

This has been tested within the Termux app on ChromeOS, on x86.

Platform Support

Current platform support for Pillow. Binary distributions are contributed for each release on a volunteer basis, but the source should compile and run everywhere platform support is listed. In general, we aim to support all current versions of Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Continuous Integration Targets

These platforms are built and tested for every change.

Operating system	Tested Python versions	Tested Architecture
Alpine	3.7	x86-64
Arch	3.7	x86-64
Amazon Linux 1	3.6	x86-64
Amazon Linux 2	3.6	x86-64
CentOS 6	3.6	x86-64
CentOS 7	3.6	x86-64
Debian 9 Stretch	3.5	x86
Debian 10 Buster	3.7	x86
Fedora 30	3.7	x86-64
Fedora 31	3.7	x86-64
macOS 10.14 Catalina	3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8	x86-64
Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS	3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, PyPy3	x86-64
Windows Server 2012 R2	3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 --------------------------+ PyPy3, 3.7/MinGW	x86, x86-64 -----------------------+ x86

Other Platforms

These platforms have been reported to work at the versions mentioned.

Note

Contributors please test Pillow on your platform then update this document and send a pull request.

Operating system	Tested Python versions	Latest tested Pillow version	Tested processors
macOS 10.14 Mojave	2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 ------------------------------+ 3.4	6.0.0 --------------------------------+ 5.4.1	x86-64
macOS 10.13 High Sierra	2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6	4.2.1	x86-64
macOS 10.12 Sierra	2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6	4.1.1	x86-64
Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan	2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 ------------------------------+ 3.3	5.4.1 --------------------------------+ 4.1.0	x86-64
Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks	2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4	3.0.0	x86-64
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion	2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3		x86-64
Redhat Linux 6	2.6		x86
CentOS 6.3	2.7, 3.3		x86
Fedora 23	2.7, 3.4	3.1.0	x86-64
Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS	2.6, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 PyPy5.3.1, PyPy3 v2.4.0 ------------------------------+ 2.7 ------------------------------+ 2.7, 3.2	3.4.1 --------------------------------+ 4.3.0 --------------------------------+ 3.4.1	x86,x86-64 -----------------------+ x86-64 -----------------------+ ppc
Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS	2.6	2.3.0	x86,x86-64
Debian 8.2 Jessie	2.7, 3.4	3.1.0	x86-64
Raspbian Jessie	2.7, 3.4	3.1.0	arm
Raspbian Stretch	2.7, 3.5	4.0.0	arm
Gentoo Linux	2.7, 3.2	2.1.0	x86-64
FreeBSD 11.1	2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6	4.3.0	x86-64
FreeBSD 10.3	2.7, 3.4, 3.5	4.2.0	x86-64
FreeBSD 10.2	2.7, 3.4	3.1.0	x86-64
Windows 8.1 Pro	2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4	2.4.0	x86,x86-64
Windows 8 Pro	2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4a3	2.2.0	x86,x86-64
Windows 7 Pro	2.7, 3.2, 3.3	3.4.1	x86-64
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise	3.3		x86-64

Old Versions

You can download old distributions from the release history at PyPI and by direct URL access eg. https://pypi.org/project/Pillow/1.0/.

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installation.rst

installation.rst

Installation

Warnings

Notes

Basic Installation

Windows Installation

macOS Installation

Linux Installation

FreeBSD Installation

Building From Source

External Libraries

Build Options

Building on macOS

Building on Windows

Building on FreeBSD

Building on Linux

Building on Android

Platform Support

Continuous Integration Targets

Other Platforms

Old Versions

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installation.rst

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installation.rst

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Installation

Warnings

Notes

Basic Installation

Windows Installation

macOS Installation

Linux Installation

FreeBSD Installation

Building From Source

External Libraries

Build Options

Building on macOS

Building on Windows

Building on FreeBSD

Building on Linux

Building on Android

Platform Support

Continuous Integration Targets

Other Platforms

Old Versions