Porting

Porting existing PIL-based code to Pillow

Pillow is a functional drop-in replacement for the Python Imaging Library.

PIL is Python 2 only. Pillow dropped support for Python 2 in Pillow 7.0. So if you would like to run the latest version of Pillow, you will first and foremost need to port your code from Python 2 to 3.

To run your existing PIL-compatible code with Pillow, it needs to be modified to import the Image module from the PIL namespace instead of the global namespace. Change this::

import Image

to this::

from PIL import Image

The :py:mod:PIL._imaging module has been moved to :py:mod:PIL.Image.core. You can now import it like this::

from PIL.Image import core as _imaging

The image plugin loading mechanism has changed. Pillow no longer automatically imports any file in the Python path with a name ending in :file:ImagePlugin.py. You will need to import your image plugin manually.

Pillow will raise an exception if the core extension can't be loaded for any reason, including a version mismatch between the Python and extension code. Previously PIL allowed Python only code to run if the core extension was not available.