About

Goals

The fork author’s goal is to foster and support active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via GitHub Actions and AppVeyor

• Publicized development activity on GitHub

• Regular releases to the Python Package Index

License

Like PIL, Pillow is licensed under the open source HPND License

Why a fork?

PIL is not setuptools compatible. Please see this Image-SIG post for a more detailed explanation. Also, PIL’s bi-yearly (or greater) release schedule was too infrequent to accommodate the large number and frequency of issues reported.

What about PIL?

Note

Prior to Pillow 2.0.0, very few image code changes were made. Pillow 2.0.0 added Python 3 support and includes many bug fixes from many contributors.

The last PIL release was in 2009 (1.1.7) and no future releases are expected. In January 2020, the PyPI moderators exhausted the PEP 541 process for contacting the PIL project owner and the PIL project on PyPI was transferred to the Pillow team. The Pillow team has no plans to update the PIL project on PyPI.