Installing PIL (Python Imaging Library) in Win7 64

Question

I'm trying to install said library for use with Python. I tried downloading the executable installer for Windows, which runs, but says it doesn't find a Python installation. Then tried registering (http://effbot.org/zone/python-register.htm) Python, but the script says it can't register (although the keys appear in my register).

Then I tried downloading the source package: I run the setup.py build and it works, but when I run setup.py install it says the following:

running install
running build
running build_py
running build_ext
building '_imaging' extension
error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

What can I do?

UPDATE (May 2014): Like said by some comments and answers, PIL is currently unmantained, and the way to go now is to use Pillow (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/, pip install pillow).

Answer 1

I was having the same problem so I decided to download the source kit and install it according to how you posted above...

1. Downloaded Source Kit
2. Opened command prompt on that folder and typed python setup.py build
3. Then I typed python setup.py install

It worked perfectly!

Now, some notes: when I typed python setup.py build, I saw that Microsoft Visual Studio v9.0 C compiler was being used to build everything.

So probably it's something with your compiler not correctly configured or something...

Anyways, that worked with me so thank you!

Answer 2

Compiling PIL on Windows x64 is apparently a bit of a pain. (Well, compiling anything on Windows is a bit of a pain in my experience. But still.) As well as PIL itself you'll need to build many dependencies. See these notes from the mailing list too.

There's an unofficial precompiled binary for x64 linked from this message, but I haven't tried it myself. Might be worth a go if you don't mind the download being from one of those slightly dodgy file-upload sites. Other than that... well, you could always give up and instead the 32-bit Python binary instead.

Answer 3

Make sure you have the Visual C++ Redistributable package installed on your machine.

Answer 4

I think I had a similar problem in the past, with another python library. I believe that it was a windows permission issue. Try adding "Users" to your python directory, and give them full access.

Answer 5

If you installed a win64 python, you need a win64 PIL. The official PIL download site only has win32, as far as I can tell. The win32 installer will not see your 64-bit python installation.

No amount of tinkering with permissions or redistributables will fix this. You could use the win32 python instead (the Win64 python is mutant anyhow; Microsoft decided that C 'long' should be 32 bits in their 64-bit world, so python 'ints' are only 32 bits in Win64 python).

Since sizeof(long)!=sizeof(ptr) in win64, porting C extensions can be problematic, and will not be the same as porting them to linux 64. E.g. it seems that Win64 numpy is experimental/broken whereas linux64 numpy has been fine for years. My recommendation is if you use win64, stick with win32 python. If you want 64-bit python use linux.

Answer 6

Pillow is new version

PIL-1.1.7.win-amd64-py2.x installers are available at

http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pil