PIL: DLL load failed: specified procedure could no

Question

I've been beginning to work with images in Python and I wanted to start using PIL (Pillow). To install it, I ran pip install Pillow. When installing, PIL was not previously installed. I also tried uninstalling it and reinstalling it, as well as using pip3 install Pillow.

When I run it in Python, my first line is:

File "C:\Program Files\Python36\lib\site-packages\PIL\Image.py", line 56, in <module>
from . import _imaging as core
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.

I checked the directory, and the file _imaging.cp36-win_amd64.pyd is present under the PIL folder.

Why is this happening if the needed DLL is there? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

As in Sean's answer, I had to uninstall (I'm using Anaconda Python 3.6, BTW) with

conda uninstall pillow

I tried it with PIL, but there was no such package. Uninstalling pillow also meant uninstalling packages that depend on it, in my case "anaconda-navigator" and "scikit-image". After I reinstalled Pillow 4.0.0 with

 conda install pillow=4.0.0

and tested it with

python -c "from PIL import Image"

which, if successful, you don't see an error message, I reinstalled the packages that were uninstalled along with Pillow 4.1.0.

conda install anaconda-navigator
conda install scikit-image

Answer 2

This works for me using win10 and py 3.6. Simply uninstall Pillow 4.1.0 pip3 uninstall Pillow Then install Pillow 4.0.0 pip3 install Pillow==4.0.0

Answer 3

This problem is also fixed by upgrading Python to 3.6.1, per this GitHub discussion.

The difference is that Pillow 4.1.0 was built with Python 3.6.1 while Pillow 4.0.0 was built with Python 3.6.0.

Apparently PYTHON36.DLL from Python 3.6.0 is missing functions (PySlice_AdjustIndices and PySlice_Unpack) that are used when building with Python 3.6.1.

The solution is to upgrade to Python 3.6.1.

Answer 4

I had this problem as well with Python 3.6. I just avoided the problem by uninstalling pillow (4.1.0) and then installing an older version of pillow (4.0.0). It seems to run okay with the older version.

Answer 5

If you're using Anaconda, try

conda uninstall pillow and then pip install pillow

Came across this issue while working on Caffe2 on Windows 10 (Anaconda 4.5) and this worked for me. Here's the github post on this issue.

Answer 6

There's a problem in Python itself which means binary wheels build using Python 3.6.1 (like Pillow 4.1.0) won't install on Python 3.6.0.

This has affected a number of Python libraries.

However, there's the new Pillow 4.1.1 release works around this, so you can now update to Pillow 4.1.1 and use it with both Python 3.6.0 and 3.6.1.

More info:

• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/2479
• https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-March/147707.html
• https://bugs.python.org/issue29943