No Module named PIL
Question:
I know PIL is deprecated, so I installed Pillow instead, and for backward compatibility reason, Pillow is still using PIL as its module name.
Here’s my pip freeze look like for Pillow:
Pillow=3.2.0
Here’s how I use it in my code:
import PIL as pillow
from PIL import Image
As someone suggested in a similar post, also, I tried
import PIL
from PIL import Image
Neither works.
Both give me this error:
ImportError: No module named PIL
Also, I tried:
import Image
it gives me:
ImportError: No module named Image
Help is really appreciated!
Answers:
As per my comment since it helped you out and answered your problem:
The issue that you were seeing is that you had pip version 1.5.6, and the version of pip does dictate how packages are unzipped, which ultimately determines whether or not modules are loaded properly.
All that is needed is:
pip install --upgrade pip
Which allows pip to upgrade itself.
Use sudo if you’re on Mac/Linux, otherwise you’ll likely need to ‘Run as Administrator’ on Windows.
And voila, you can now properly import the PIL modules:
Python 2.7.12 (default, Jun 29 2016, 13:16:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.31)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PIL
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> Image
<module 'PIL.Image' from '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/Image.pyc'>
In my case, on Windows, all I needed to do is to run:
pip install pillow
You can use python -m pip install Pillow or pip install Pillow
I’m having this trouble too recently, so let me share my take on this. I’m on Mac OS X Mojave 10.14. I tried running the pip install pillow so many times blindly without finding deeper understanding as to where my python searches for its packages.
I encountered this error when I upgraded from OS X High Sierra to Mojave. My previously working Scrapy project just stopped running properly.
Note that I didn’t use virtualenv.
First, you need to check which python is used by the system. In the Terminal, run
which -a python
You’ll get something similar to this:
nicholass-mbp:~ nicholaslie$ which -a python
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
This leads me to searching inside the /usr/local/ folder. Turns out there’s a folder to where my python is searching its packages, and that is inside /usr/local/lib/python2.7 (python) or /usr/local/lib/python3.7 (python3)
What my current pip install pillow do is installing the PIL package inside the /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages directory, but not to /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages
However, since my project uses Python 3, No module named PIL error simply tells you that the python3 instance you’re using cannot find the PIL library.
I used Homebrew for managing my system packages such as node, python, etc. So what I did was reinstall python3 with Homebrew with:
brew reinstall python, then run pip3 install pillow.
Just ensure that the PIL package is installed properly in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages and you should be good to go. Hope this helps someone.
OSX
sudo easy_install pip
pip install Pillow --user
For me, when I was trying to use PIL in PyCharm, initially the Project Interpreter was not looking at the correct location for Python 3.7. This has been corrected and using PIL works for me now (corrected Interpreter shown in image attached).
This solution is for pip version 20 and using PyCharm.
I’d upgrade pip to version 20.0.2 as pip suggested but I had to get back to version 19
python -m pip install pip==19.3.1
I also installed Pillow from command line
pip install Pillow
And finally installed Pillow inside PyCharm on Settings -> Project:your-project-name -> Project Interpreter, clicked on + button and installed Pillow.
I know PIL is deprecated, so I installed Pillow instead, and for backward compatibility reason, Pillow is still using PIL as its module name.
Here’s my pip freeze look like for Pillow:
Pillow=3.2.0
Here’s how I use it in my code:
import PIL as pillow
from PIL import Image
As someone suggested in a similar post, also, I tried
import PIL
from PIL import Image
Neither works.
Both give me this error:
ImportError: No module named PIL
Also, I tried:
import Image
it gives me:
ImportError: No module named Image
Help is really appreciated!
As per my comment since it helped you out and answered your problem:
The issue that you were seeing is that you had pip version 1.5.6, and the version of pip does dictate how packages are unzipped, which ultimately determines whether or not modules are loaded properly.
All that is needed is:
pip install --upgrade pip
Which allows pip to upgrade itself.
Use sudo if you’re on Mac/Linux, otherwise you’ll likely need to ‘Run as Administrator’ on Windows.
And voila, you can now properly import the PIL modules:
Python 2.7.12 (default, Jun 29 2016, 13:16:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.31)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PIL
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> Image
<module 'PIL.Image' from '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/Image.pyc'>
In my case, on Windows, all I needed to do is to run:
pip install pillow
You can use python -m pip install Pillow or pip install Pillow
I’m having this trouble too recently, so let me share my take on this. I’m on Mac OS X Mojave 10.14. I tried running the pip install pillow so many times blindly without finding deeper understanding as to where my python searches for its packages.
I encountered this error when I upgraded from OS X High Sierra to Mojave. My previously working Scrapy project just stopped running properly.
Note that I didn’t use virtualenv.
First, you need to check which python is used by the system. In the Terminal, run
which -a python
You’ll get something similar to this:
nicholass-mbp:~ nicholaslie$ which -a python
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
This leads me to searching inside the /usr/local/ folder. Turns out there’s a folder to where my python is searching its packages, and that is inside /usr/local/lib/python2.7 (python) or /usr/local/lib/python3.7 (python3)
What my current pip install pillow do is installing the PIL package inside the /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages directory, but not to /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages
However, since my project uses Python 3, No module named PIL error simply tells you that the python3 instance you’re using cannot find the PIL library.
I used Homebrew for managing my system packages such as node, python, etc. So what I did was reinstall python3 with Homebrew with:
brew reinstall python, then run pip3 install pillow.
Just ensure that the PIL package is installed properly in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages and you should be good to go. Hope this helps someone.
OSX
sudo easy_install pip
pip install Pillow --user
For me, when I was trying to use PIL in PyCharm, initially the Project Interpreter was not looking at the correct location for Python 3.7. This has been corrected and using PIL works for me now (corrected Interpreter shown in image attached).
This solution is for pip version 20 and using PyCharm.
I’d upgrade pip to version 20.0.2 as pip suggested but I had to get back to version 19
python -m pip install pip==19.3.1
I also installed Pillow from command line
pip install Pillow
And finally installed Pillow inside PyCharm on Settings -> Project:your-project-name -> Project Interpreter, clicked on + button and installed Pillow.