PNG display in PIL broken on OS X Mavericks?

Question

I've noticed that PNG images aren't displaying in Tkinter apps using ImageTk.PhotoImage in OS X Mavericks. But, GIFs and JPEGs display fine. There's no error printed or exception thrown and debugging the code shows the image is read and has the correct height & width. Here's a simplified example:

import Tkinter
from PIL import Image, ImageTk

logo_file = 'test.png'
#logo_file = 'test.gif'


class Application(Tkinter.Frame):
    def __init__(self, master):
        Tkinter.Frame.__init__(self, master)
        self.master.minsize(width=512, height=256)
        self.master.config()

        self.pack()

        self.main_frame = Tkinter.Frame()
        self.some_image = ImageTk.PhotoImage(Image.open(logo_file))

        some_label = Tkinter.Label(self.main_frame, image=self.some_image)
        some_label.config()
        some_label.pack(side='top')

        self.main_frame.place(in_=self.master, anchor='c', relx=.5, rely=.5)

root = Tkinter.Tk()
app = Application(root)
app.mainloop()

If you use a GIF the image will be displayed, but using a PNG it will not. Again, this is only happening on OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion works fine. I've tried re-installing (compiling PIL) with no luck, as well as trying a new virtualenv.

Is there perhaps some PNG attribute I need to set correctly when creating/saving the PNG? Or is this a bug in PIL or Tkinter or OS X?

Update to add some details

I'm using:

• Python 2.7.5 (/usr/bin/python)
• PIL 1.1.7 (compiled using pip)

This is on a machine that was just updated to Mavericks from Mountain Lion, and previously had PIL installed, and I haven't messed with the system Python shipped by Apple.

Update 2 Pillow setup summary

I installed Pillow 2.2.1 and it says it has PNG support:

--------------------------------------------------------------------
PIL SETUP SUMMARY
--------------------------------------------------------------------
version      Pillow 2.2.1
platform     darwin 2.7.5 (default, Aug 25 2013, 00:04:04)
             [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--- TKINTER support available
--- JPEG support available
--- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
--- TIFF G3/G4 (experimental) support available
--- FREETYPE2 support available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
*** WEBP support not available
*** WEBPMUX support not available
--------------------------------------------------------------------

I also uninstalled and re-installed libpng using brew (libpng 1.5.14). I then re-installed Pillow to make sure it built with it, though I think it uses zlib.

Update 3 trying to build Python 2.7.5

Perhaps the issue is with zlib, trying to compile Python 2.7.5 I get this:

Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
_bsddb             _sqlite3           _ssl             
bsddb185           dbm                dl               
gdbm               imageop         linuxaudiodev    
nis                ossaudiodev        readline        
spwd               sunaudiodev        zlib
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.


Failed to build these modules:
_tkinter

Answer 1

I think your problem is that your PIL was built without PNG support, or with only partial PNG support, on your Mavericks machine.

If PIL can't find both libpng and libz where it wants to, you won't have complete PNG support. And after upgrading from Mountain Lion to Mavericks, this seems to sometimes be a problem.

This may not be the same problem you're having. For example, it could be down to Apple using a buggy version of Tcl/Tk again (as they infamously did in Snow Leopard). But it's definitely worth trying.

With Pillow, and some versions of old-school PIL (but really, if you're not using Pillow, you almost definitely should be), the end of the install process gives you a friendly "PIL SETUP SUMMARY" section that shows you all the important configuration stuff.

I had the exact same problem with Pillow 2.2.1 on a locally-built Python 3.3.2. I solved it by using Homebrew to install libpng, then rebuilding Pillow:

$ brew install libpng
$ pip-3.3 uninstall pillow
$ pip-3.3 install pillow

Answer 2

I was experiencing the same problem and I did the following. It seems to be fixed.

sudo unistall pillow
xcode-select --install
pip install pillow

It seems to be working great. I also installed all the items below, but it seems you have it already installed

brew install libtiff libjpeg libpng webp littlecms 

Answer 3

Did you install Pillow dependencies?

pip uninstall Pillow
brew install libtiff libjpeg webp littlecms
pip install Pillow

You will need HomeBrew to execute the brew command.

Answer 4

I installed Pillow from homebrew (brew install Pillow), all necessary dependencies will be installed automatically. Problem solved.