Basic Installation¶

Note

The following instructions will install Pillow with support for most common image formats. See External Libraries for a full list of external libraries supported.

Install Pillow with pip:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

Optionally, install defusedxml for Pillow to read XMP data, and olefile for Pillow to read FPX and MIC images:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade defusedxml olefile

Linux

We provide binaries for Linux for each of the supported Python versions in the manylinux wheel format. These include support for all optional libraries except libimagequant. Raqm support requires FriBiDi to be installed separately:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

Most major Linux distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu and ArchLinux also include Pillow in packages that previously contained PIL e.g. python-imaging. Debian splits it into two packages, python3-pil and python3-pil.imagetk.

macOS

We provide binaries for macOS for each of the supported Python versions in the wheel format. These include support for all optional libraries except libimagequant. Raqm support requires FriBiDi to be installed separately:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

While we provide binaries for both x86-64 and arm64, we do not provide universal2 binaries. However, it is simple to combine our current binaries to create one:

python3 -m pip download --only-binary=:all: --platform macosx_10_10_x86_64 Pillow
python3 -m pip download --only-binary=:all: --platform macosx_11_0_arm64 Pillow
python3 -m pip install delocate

Then, with the names of the downloaded wheels, use Python to combine them:

from delocate.fuse import fuse_wheels
fuse_wheels('Pillow-9.4.0-2-cp39-cp39-macosx_10_10_x86_64.whl', 'Pillow-9.4.0-cp39-cp39-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl', 'Pillow-9.4.0-cp39-cp39-macosx_11_0_universal2.whl')

Windows

We provide Pillow binaries for Windows compiled for the matrix of supported Pythons in the wheel format. These include x86, x86-64 and arm64 versions. These binaries include support for all optional libraries except libimagequant and libxcb. Raqm support requires FriBiDi to be installed separately:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

To install Pillow in MSYS2, see Building From Source.

FreeBSD

Pillow can be installed on FreeBSD via the official Ports or Packages systems:

Ports:

cd /usr/ports/graphics/py-pillow && make install clean

Packages:

pkg install py38-pillow

Note

The Pillow FreeBSD port and packages are tested by the ports team with all supported FreeBSD versions.