Python Imaging Library
Pillow
Pillow adds powerful image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter — open, edit, and save many different image file formats with a simple, well-documented API.
Project
Documentation
Our documentation is hosted by Read the Docs and includes installation instructions, handbook, API reference and release notes.
Discussion
Discussion about Pillow development, programming and technical issues occurs on GitHub, Stack Overflow and Gitter.
Source Code
Our source code is hosted by GitHub and tested on GitHub Actions and Codecov, and uploaded to the Python Package Index.
Support Pillow's Future
Pillow is free, open source software maintained by volunteers who review pull requests, fix bugs, write documentation, and ship regular releases — all in their spare time. Millions of projects depend on Pillow every day. If Pillow powers your product or business, consider sponsoring us to help keep it secure, fast, and well-maintained for everyone.
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Learn MorePowering the Python ecosystem
Pillow is a dependency of thousands of packages. Here are a few well-known open source projects that rely on it for image processing.
Django
The Django web
framework uses Pillow to validate and introspect uploaded images for its
built-in ImageField.
Wagtail
Wagtail, the popular Django-based CMS, depends on Pillow to generate the image renditions and thumbnails used throughout its admin and templates.
Home Assistant
Home Assistant uses Pillow to process camera snapshots and generate thumbnails across its smart home integrations.
Matplotlib
Matplotlib, the widely used plotting library, uses Pillow to read and write image formats such as JPEG when saving figures.
From PIL to Pillow
Pillow is a fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), but after more than a decade of active development it has effectively become the Python Imaging Library.
Fredrik Lundh, aka Effbot, releases the Python Imaging Library (PIL).
Jeffrey ‘Alex’ Clark forks the project and renames it to Pillow to add setuptools support. A community of contributors soon joins in.
Development of the original PIL has stopped, with no releases since 2009. Pillow is adopted as its replacement in Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu.
Following the PEP 541 package abandonment process, PyPI moderators declare the original PIL package officially abandoned, confirming Pillow as its de facto successor.
Pillow is maintained by a global community of contributors and is a dependency of thousands of Python projects worldwide.
Pillow 9.0.0 was dedicated to the memory of Fredrik Lundh, aka Effbot, who died in November 2021. Fredrik created PIL in 1995 and was instrumental in the early success of Python.