sorl-thumbnail: encoder error -2 when writing image file

Question

I've been using sorl-thumbnail for some time without problems. However, the following error started to appear: encoder error -2 when writing image file.

The following code causes the error:

from sorl.thumbnail import get_thumbnail
photobooth_thumbnail = get_thumbnail(img_file,
    PHOTOBOOTH_THUMB_SIZE, crop='center', quality=99)

being img_file a Django models' ImageField and when PHOTOBOOTH_THUMB_SIZE is "sufficiently large". When I was using PHOTOBOOTH_THUMB_SIZE = '670', everything worked just fine, but when I increased it to PHOTOBOOTH_THUMB_SIZE = '1280', the aforementioned error appeared.

I'm suspecting this is an error in PIL rather than in sorl-thumbnail, given the low level message. I'd like to have bigger thumbnails, so I'd appreciate any help on this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I ended up patching the file pil_engine.py in /lib/python2.7/site-packages/sorl/thumbnail/engines:

--- pil_engine.py   2013-09-09 03:58:27.000000000 +0000
+++ pil_engine_new.py   2013-11-05 21:19:15.053034383 +0000
@@ -79,6 +79,7 @@
             image.save(buf, **params)
         except IOError:
             params.pop('optimize')
+            ImageFile.MAXBLOCK = image.size[0] * image.size[1]
             image.save(buf, **params)
         raw_data = buf.getvalue()
         buf.close()

This fixed the issue for me.