About

Goals

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

• Continuous integration testing via GitHub Actions, AppVeyor and Travis CI

• 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 current bi-yearly (or greater) release schedule is 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.

As more time passes since the last PIL release (1.1.7 in 2009), the likelihood of a new PIL release decreases. However, we’ve yet to hear an official “PIL is dead” announcement.