PIL Image ImportError

Question

I have Pillow and qrcode modules installed in a virtual environment.

From the python shell, I can create a test image programmatically using PIL:

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> img = Image.new('1', (200, 200))
>>> img.save('test-image.jpeg', 'JPEG')

Great, that works just as I would expect it to. However, I'm getting this error when I try to use a module that relies on PIL:

>>> import qrcode
>>> qr_code = qrcode.make("1") 
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
   File "/home/vagrant/.virtualenvs/env1/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/qrcode/main.py", line 8, in make
     return qr.make_image()
   File "/home/vagrant/.virtualenvs/env1/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/qrcode/main.py", line 186, in make_image
     from qrcode.image.pil import PilImage
   File "/home/vagrant/.virtualenvs/env1/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/qrcode/image/pil.py", line 5, in <module>
     import Image
ImportError: No module named Image

Why can't qrcode import PIL's Image class but it works from the shell?

Solution

This is an issue with your installation: Image module have been installed as subpackage of a PIL module, while the library you are using expects Image module to be directly in the python path. Simplest solution is to replace:

import Image

with:

from PIL import Image

in file qrcode/image/pil.py.

Comments

[abarnert]

Yeah, old-school PIL sometimes installed one way, sometimes the other. Many people would explicitly add the package to sys.path to work around this, but that was always a horrible idea. Pillow picked the more sensible one and went with it consistently, but there are a few other packages out there that expect the other.

[abarnert]

But… this isn't going to work. If you look at the source, it already tries from PIL import Image, and only falls back to import Image when that fails.

[Stefano Sanfilippo]

In this case, there must be something wrong with your virtualenv. Just tested and it works: I ran virtualenv so && source so/bin/activate && pip install pillow qrcode six && python and typed import qrcode; qrcode.make("1").show(). Sorry for the poor, comment-fit formatting.

[Marc Wilson]

I spun up a new vagrant box and did a fresh install of everything and things are working as expected. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.