Python Image Library fails with message "decoder JPEG not available" - PIL

Question

PIL does support JPEG in my system.

Whenever I do an upload, my code is failing with:

File "PIL/Image.py", line 375, in _getdecoder
    raise IOError("decoder %s not available" % decoder_name)
IOError: decoder jpeg not available

How can I resolve this?

Solution 1

libjpeg-dev is required to be able to process jpegs with pillow (or PIL), so you need to install it and then recompile pillow. It also seems that libjpeg8-dev is needed on Ubuntu 14.04

If you're still using PIL then you should really be using pillow these days though, so first pip uninstall PIL before following these instructions to switch, or if you have a good reason for sticking with PIL then replace "pillow" with "PIL" in the below).

On Ubuntu:

# install libjpeg-dev with apt
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
# if you're on Ubuntu 14.04, also install this
sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev

# reinstall pillow
pip install --no-cache-dir -I pillow

If that doesn't work, try one of the below, depending on whether you are on 64bit or 32bit Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu x64:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib

Or for Ubuntu 32bit:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/

Then reinstall pillow:

pip install --no-cache-dir -I pillow

(Edits to include feedback from comments. Thanks Charles Offenbacher for pointing out this differs for 32bit, and t-mart for suggesting use of --no-cache-dir).

Solution 2

For those on OSX, I used the following binary to get libpng and libjpeg installed systemwide:

libpng & libjpeg for OSX

Because I already had PIL installed (via pip on a virtualenv), I ran:

pip uninstall PIL
pip install PIL --upgrade

This resolved the decoder JPEG not available error for me.

UPDATE (4/24/14):

Newer versions of pip require additional flags to download libraries (including PIL) from external sources. Try the following:

pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL

See the following answer for additional info: pip install PIL dont install into virtualenv

UPDATE 2:

If on OSX Mavericks, you'll want to set the ARCHFLAGS flag as @RicardoGonzales comments below:

ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL

Solution 3

This is the only way that worked for me. Installing packages and reinstalling PIL didn't work.

On ubuntu, install the required package:

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev

(you may also want to install libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev to enable other decoders).

Then replace PIL with pillow:

pip uninstall PIL
pip install pillow

Solution 4

The followed works on ubuntu 12.04:

pip uninstall PIL
apt-get install libjpeg-dev
apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev
pip install PIL --upgrade

when your see "-- JPEG support avaliable" that means it works.

But, if it still doesn't work when your edit your jpeg image, check the python path !! my python path missed /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/, so I edit the ~/.bashrc add the following code to this file:

Edit: export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/

then, finally, it works!!

Solution 5

On Fedora 17 I had to install libjpeg-devel and afterwards reinstall PIL:

sudo yum install --assumeyes libjpeg-devel
sudo pip-python install --upgrade PIL

View more solutions

Comments

[Naypa]

It is a valid question. PIL is a famous Python Library and it gives a weird error in some linux systems. This question and the answer just helped me. It is a typical SO question.

[FlipMcF]

The PRAGMATIST and OCD in me says it does belong on ServerFault, not on SO. But how many programmers have hit this problem? I vote to move the question to ServerFault, and leave a redirect in place on SO.

[FlipMcF]

Ok, Fine. I edited the question to fit in the rules of SO. Hopefully, @ravi doesn't mind the edit.

[Wee]

Maybe you can read this and try it: stackoverflow.com/questions/18504835/…

[Dhiraj Thakur]

For anyone who's just starting out with PIL should note that is outdated and not really maintained anymore. If you want to work with images in your project, use PILLOW which is updated and maintained fork or PIL.

[Stephen Tetreault]

@dkt I'm using pillow and am here because I just hit this issue.

[Dhiraj Thakur]

@SMT : In that case use the excellent answers below, i just wanted inform anyone who is new about pillow.

[Stephen Tetreault]

@dkt I know, I was just stating that the issue still persists was all.

[Christos Hayward]

@FlipMcF A question should be migrated from StackOverflow to ServerFault, not primarily because it would be in scope for ServerFault, but because it is out of scope for StackOverflow's focus on helping programmers. This is the principle why questions people asked on StackOverflow about software that would let them use old versions of Internet Exploder should not be migrated to SuperUser. Questions about accessing program X are in scope for SuperUser, but that doesn't mean that they are out of scope on StackOverflow as many web developers have spent much time on appeasing Exploder.

[Ravi]

The problem was that I had two python packages. One that ships in with ubuntu and another that belonged to Zope Server. Somehow, the library was corrupted because I had incorrectly installed it in the wrong package. Otherwise, there is no problem.

[Charles Offenbacher]

For the record, that only works on x86_64, I had to run: sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/; sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 /usr/lib/; sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/

[John F.]

Just wanted to add that I upgraded from Ubuntu 12.10 to 13.04 and had to create the symlinks like described under the Ubuntu x64 section. That worked for me.

[Thorin Schiffer]

Python development under windows is painful. I'd advise not to.

[Lucas Ou-Yang]

hi, i think i'm having an issue with the python path not working because installing PIL stats that --JPEG support IS available. however, actually doing pil opts with .jpeg images causes decoder jpeg errors. stackoverflow.com/questions/18504835/…

[tatlar]

I had this problem after upgrading to Mavericks (10.9). The following SO post solved the problem for me. Scroll down to the install command line tools comment by @Formulka

[Dhiraj Thakur]

For anyone who's just starting out with PIL should note that is outdated and not really maintained anymore. If you want to work with images in your project, use PILLOW which is updated and maintained fork or PIL.

[rkrzr]

I had to install sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev additionally to get it to work.

[deadlock]

If you're on Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit, try zeantsoi's solution, I know he did it for OSX but I tried it and it worked for me.

[napstercake]

I got this error: Could not find any donwnloads that satisfy the requirement pil

[zeantsoi]

@RicardoGonzales, you're probably running on a version of pip the requires you to pass additional flags. Please see the update to my answer.

[napstercake]

@zeantsoi now is downloading the package and install but after "Cleaning up" message. I got the error refers to: "-c import setuptools, tokenize;__file ... ..." any advice?

[napstercake]

@zeantsoi ok I've found the solution with args for OSX Maverics: ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error‌​-in-future pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL

[Lucas]

This might be due to a separate problem with my installation of brew, but I had to brew unlink jpeg && brew link jpeg before installing Pillow.

[Akshay Mukadam]

@Rolo after 3 hr your second option worked for me thanks lot the pillow is dumbass

[Packet Tracer]

after a lot of searching this worked for me in ubuntu. I installed pil with easyinstall and pillow with pip in a virtualenv but couldn't get it working. But with this pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL it worked. Thanks!!

[Jakub Roztocil]

The same goes for RHEL/CentOS.

[Chris Hawkes]

this works like a charm on Ubuntu 14-04 with django 1.7

[zengr]

FYI: pip uninstall pillow and pip install pillow works but pip install -I pillow didn't work.

[Agey]

I had the same problem after trying this, but after searching i found that the server had python-imaging installed from aptitude, and installed as well in pip as global. I had to remove those as well before trying the solution mentioned here.

[DataGreed]

didn't work for me on Yosemite, I get _imagingft.c:73:10: fatal error: 'freetype/fterrors.h' file not found

[Paolo]

List of all required dependencies.

[t-mart]

Recent versions of pip must cache downloaded packages and their compilations. Certainly, it was a very lengthy to pip install things the first time, but then subsequent uninstalls and (re)installs were suspiciously quick. Anyway, the methods above did not work for me until I ran pip install --no-cache-dir pillow. Good luck!

[dranxo]

Thanks for this. The --no-cache-dir option helped me as well

[Dennis Golomazov]

I did this some time ago, and suddenly the error reappeared today. Upgrading pillow fixed the problem: pip install pillow --upgrade.

[ismailsunni]

I haf similar problem with Pillow, and this solution is also working

[Berk]

Currently apt-get install libjpeg-dev also installs libjpeg8-dev

[George]

My problem was that python used default 2.7 version, and pip installed for version 2.7, while my project was supposed to use python 3 and pip3.

[Sophie McCarrell]

I personally just needed to uninstall and reinstall pillow. Strangely that's it. And this was on a new server, so im not sure why it didn't work the first time... perhaps the order of installation was incorrect.

[Junaid]

only doing this worked for me. pip install --no-cache-dir -I pillow

[Kurt]

Protip for everybody, libjpeg-dev must be installed before Pillow is installed.