Why is pip installing Pillow for OS X 10.12, when

Question

When trying to import PIL (using Pillow), I get the following error:

    from PIL import ImageTk, Image
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/ImageTk.py", line 42, in <module>
    from . import Image
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/Image.py", line 60, in <module>
    from . import _imaging as core
ImportError: dlopen(/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/_imaging.so, 2): Symbol not found: _clock_gettime
  Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/.dylibs/liblzma.5.dylib (which was built for Mac OS X 10.12)
  Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
 in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/.dylibs/liblzma.5.dylib

Note the line Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/.dylibs/liblzma.5.dylib (which was built for Mac OS X 10.12) and specifically '(which was built for Mac OS X 10.12)'.

I have a hunch that I may have corrupted something when I attempted to manually install the wrong version of xCode (not compatible with 10.11.6, which is on this computer). I have installed Pillow using pip install Pillow - but that installation resulted in this error. Is there a way to force pip to install a certain version of Pillow, to see if the problem lies in pip installing a problematic version?

Answer 1

This is a bug in the latest Pillow 5.1.0 release.

It was caused by upgrading Xcode from version 8 to 9.2 for building the binary wheels.

El Capitan 10.11 is the "min macOS to run" for Xcode 8.

Sierra 10.12.6 is the min for Xcode 9.2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode#Xcode_7.0_-9.x(since_Free_On-Device_Development

There will be a Pillow 5.1.1 out to fix it at some point.

In the meantime, the workaround is: pip install 'pillow!=5.1.0'

(Or upgrade your macOS, or build from source.)

For more info, see https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/3068

Answer 2

That sounds like the wheel uploaded to PyPI was not built for your platform correctly. Unfortunately having the wheel for a PyPI package for your platform is not a guarantee that the wheel will install or work correctly, you're at the mercy of the PyPI package maintainer in this regard.

You should run pip uninstall Pillow, download the source directly from PyPI, build it manually and run pip install -e <path to rebuilt package> to install the wheel you built specifically for your machine.