Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary If you need to work with images the Pillow is the library to use. The Python Image Libary (PIL) has long been the gold standard for resizing, analyzing, and processing pictures in Python. Pillow is the modern fork that is bringing the PIL into the future so that we can all continue to use it moving forward. This week I spoke with Alex Clark about what first led him to fork the project and his experience maintaining it, including the migration to Python 3. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We also have a new sponsor this week. Rollbar is a service for tracking and aggregating your application errors so that you can find and fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link rollbar.com/podcastinit to get 90 days and 300,000 errors for free on their bootstrap plan. Visit our site to subscribe to our show, sign up for our newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey Today we’re interviewing Alex Clark about the Pillow project Interview with Alex Clark Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Tobias What were you working on that led you to forking the Python Image Library (PIL)? – Tobias What does Fredrik Lundh (author of PIL) think of Pillow? When you first forked the PIL project did you think that you would still be maintaining and updating that fork by now? – Tobias Who else works on the project with you and how did they get involved? – Tobias What kinds of special knowledge or experience have you found to be necessary for understanding and extending the routines in the library and for adding new capabilities? – Tobias Can you describe what PIL and now Pillow are and what kinds of use cases they support? – Tobias How does Pillow compare to libraries with a similar purpose such as ImageMagick? – Tobias I have seen Pillow used in computer vision contexts. What are some of the capabilities of the library that lend themselves to this purpose? – Tobias What architectural patterns does Pillow use to make image operations fast and flexible? Have you found the need to do any significant refactorings of the original code to make it compatible with modern uses and execution environments? – Tobias Have you kept up to date with newer image formats, such as webp? Are there any image formats that Pillow does not support that you would like to see added to the project? – Tobias What are some of the most interesting or innovative uses of Pillow that you have seen? – Tobias What do you have planned for the future of Pillow? – Tobias Keep In Touch Website Picks Tobias Minimalist Baker Bisect module Alex Muse – Uprising Fanstatic Links Image-SIG Random (Psychedelic) Art The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA