Using Pillow with Python 3

Question

I'm not having much luck using Pillow with Python 3.3.2 and I'd be grateful for some help. My problem is that after installing Pillow, I can't import Image.

My setup: I've got Linux Mint 16 installed (on an HP Pavilion dv7 laptop). I've got Python 3.3.2+ installed, and it's working fine. I've got Python 2.7.5+ installed, and it's working fine.

What I did: I followed the instructions at http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html to install Pillow v2.4.0 (PIL fork):

I started with:

~$ pip install Pillow

I installed python-setuptools with:

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

and also, for python 3:

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

I installed "prerequisites on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS" thus:

~$ sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev \
libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk 

(Mint 16 is based on Ubuntu 13.10, but I didn't find a list of prerequisites for any later version)

What happened: With python 2, import image worked and I could open a .png image and show it. But with python 3, 'import image' gave 'no module named Image' and 'from PIL import Image' gave 'no module named PIL'

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

After much digging, and since there's been no other answer forthcoming, I'll answer my own question. This works for the pillow installation for python3.4:

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

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip

$ sudo pip3 install Pillow

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/display /usr/bin/xv

Then in the python3.4 interactive shell enter:

>>> from PIL import Image

>>> im = Image.open("someimage.jpg")
>>> im.show()

And voilá, the image appears!

Most helpful sites:

http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html

https://askubuntu.com/questions/427358/install-pillow-for-python-3

Python 3 is a beautiful language, and it's getting there, but installing and using its imaging library shouldn't be so hard to do!