Installing PIL to use with Django on Mac OS X

Question

I\'m really annoyed by installation of PIL (Python Imaging Library) on Mac OS X 10.6. Does anyone have it installed and could post the recipe here? I\'ve tried a lot of them

Answer 1

There is a packaging fork of PIL that attempts to make it easier to install and support on many modern platforms, including OS X:

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/1.6

You should be able to install it on OS X with pip or easy_install (assuming you have XCode). If you have any trouble, please open a ticket here:

• https://github.com/collective/Pillow/issues

Answer 2

Hey check out this article, worked wonders for me on Snow Leopard.

I'd also recommend using libjpeg 0.6 instead of 0.7 noted in the article.

Good luck.

Answer 3

Yes, I have issues with PIL on 10.6.6 too, homebrew and easy_install.

The easiest solution for me was to easy_install PIL / pip install PIL, navigate to /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/, and symlink the PIL-1.1.7-.....egg file to PIL

ln -s PIL-................egg PIL


>>> import PIL
>>> from PIL import Image
# no more problems.

Edit: These days, I try to use Pillow, a library built to help install PIL. Try pip install pillow - can't hurt!

Answer 4

I have issues installing PIL with brew and easy_install on my Mac too. My solution is to download source code from http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/, extract the tar ball and use

python setup.py install

to compile and install the package.

Answer 5

Following steps worked for me:

$ brew install pip
$ export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64"
$ pip install pil

Answer 6

After fresh OS installation tried these steps:

1. Installed homebrew
2. brew install libjpeg
3. brew install pil
4. easy_install pil
5. cd /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages
6. ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/pil/1.1.7/lib/python2.6/site-packages/PIL PIL

After that I was able to load and save jpeg files... I know that this issue has a lot of different solutions and I'm not 100% my way will work for other, but it's worth to try if you just bumping your head in to the wall :)