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 Pillow7.0. So if you would like to run the latest version of Pillow, you will firstand foremost need to port your code from Python 2 to 3.

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

import Image

to this:

from PIL import Image

The _imaging module has been moved. You can now import it like this:

from PIL.Image import core as _imaging

The image plugin loading mechanism has changed. Pillow no longerautomatically imports any file in the Python path with a name endingin ImagePlugin.py. You will need to import your image pluginmanually.

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