About

Goals

The fork author's goal is to foster and support active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via GitHub Actions_
• Publicized development activity on GitHub_
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index_

.. _GitHub Actions: https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/actions .. _GitHub: https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow .. _Python Package Index: https://pypi.org/project/pillow/

License

Like PIL, Pillow is licensed under the open source MIT-CMU License <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-pillow/Pillow/main/LICENSE>_

Why a fork?

PIL is not setuptools compatible. Please see this Image-SIG post_ for a more detailed explanation. Also, PIL's bi-yearly (or greater) release schedule was too infrequent to accommodate the large number and frequency of issues reported.

.. _this Image-SIG post: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2010-August/006480.html

What about PIL?

.. note::

Prior to Pillow 2.0.0, very few image code changes were made. Pillow 2.0.0
added Python 3 support and includes many bug fixes from many contributors.

The last PIL release was in 2009 (1.1.7) and no future releases are expected <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/1535>. In January 2020, the PyPI moderators exhausted the PEP 541 process for contacting the PIL project owner <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/1535#issuecomment-570308446> and the PIL project on PyPI <https://pypi.org/project/PIL>_ was transferred to the Pillow team <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/graphs/contributors>_. The Pillow team has no plans to update the PIL project on PyPI.