No module named 'PIL'

Question

I'm running into an error where when I try

from PIL import Image, ImageFilter

in a Python file I get an error stating ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PIL'.

So far I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling both PIL and Pillow, along with just doing import Image, but the error keeps on occurring and I have no idea why. All the solutions I've found so far have had no effect on my issue.

I'm running Python 3.5 on Ubuntu 16.04

Solution 1

Alright, I found a fix

To fix the issue, I uninstalled PIL and Pillow through sudo pip3 uninstall pillow and sudo apt-get purge python3-pil. I then restarted and then used sudo -H pip3 install pillow to reinstall Pillow

The only step I was missing before was rebooting, and not reinstalling PIL afterwards.

It seems to have worked without any issues so far.

Solution 2

Had the same problem before and I tried:

 pip install pillow 
 pip install image 

import PIL --> still did not work

then I found out that it was installed as pil

c:\python36\lib\site-packages\pil

import pil

pil.__version__

'5.1.0'

Solution 3

In my case the problem had to do with virtual environments.

The python program ran in a virtual environment, but I called pip install Pillow from a normal command prompt. When I ran the program in a non-virtual environment, from PIL import Image worked.

It also worked when I called venv/scripts/activate before calling pip install Pillow. So apparently PIL is not found when installed in the python root but the program runs in a virtual environment.

Solution 4

I solved the issue with the command python3 -m pip install Pillow.

Solution 5

I am using ubuntu 18.04 and I was facing exactly same issue after installing pillow following the official documentation. I tried all hacks shared by other users but no solution. But the problem got immediately resolved when I installed python-pil using the following command:

sudo apt-get install python3-pil

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Comments

[HGamble]

Yes! This was what worked for me. If you have been running your app in a virtual environment, you have to activate the virtual environment and then install Pillow.

[André]

Be careful executing apt-get purge python3-pil on a system running Cinnamon (eg: Linux Mint). It may remove cinnamon packages as well preventing you from login. If that happens to you follow this answer to restore the system: superuser.com/a/1588720/217131