Package (Python PIL/Pillow) installed but I can't import it

Question

I want to do some image processing and I encountered a problem. Importing the pillow module doesn't seem to work. I found a simple script here to check what packages are installed and I found it, but importing it doesn't seem to work.

Here's the code I'm trying to run:

import pip

installed_packages = pip.get_installed_distributions()
installed_pillow_packages = [
    "%s==%s" % (i.key, i.version)
    for i in installed_packages
    if "pil" in i.key.lower()
]
print(installed_pillow_packages)

import pillow

And here's the result:

runfile('C:/Users/Augustas/.spyder2/temp.py', wdir=r'C:/Users/Augustas/.spyder2')
['pillow==2.6.1']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\spyderlib\widgets\externalshell\sitecustomize.py", line 601, in runfile
    execfile(filename, namespace)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\spyderlib\widgets\externalshell\sitecustomize.py", line 66, in execfile
    exec(compile(scripttext, filename, 'exec'), glob, loc)
  File "C:/Users/Augustas/.spyder2/temp.py", line 7, in <module>
    import pillow
ImportError: No module named pillow

I'm running this on Windows 8.1 using Spyder and Python 2.7.9.

Answer 1

You are importing incorrectly. Try using:

import PIL

or

from PIL import Image

PIL, i.e., Python Imaging Library is no longer maintained, Pillow is used instead. To maintain backwards compatibility, the PIL module name is used in imports.