Building PIL on OS X: Snow Leopard

Published on Feb. 25, 2010, 3:40 p.m.

Mac OS PIL Python X homebrew virtualenv

There are several places online that discuss problems installing PIL on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

This is how I got it to work.

Install lib jpeg using homebrew (which is super-aweseome!)
```
brew intall jpeg
```
.This installs the library into
```
/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg/7
```

Install libfreetype the old-fashioned way (./configure, make, sudo make install). I used freetype-2.1.10.pre-20050511.

Download, unpack PIL (I used Imaging-1.1.6). I had to make the following changes to setup.py

FREETYPE_ROOT = "/usr/local"
JPEG_ROOT = ("/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg/7/lib", "/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg/7/include")

Then, build PIL:
```
python setup.py build_ext -i
```

If the build works without any errors, you can run the tests:
```
python selftest.py
```
which should yield the following: 57 tests passed.

(optional) I like to use virtualenv, so I activate that:
```
workon myproject
```

Install PIL:
```
python setup.py install
```

At this point, code like the following works for me:

import Image
im = Image.open("/path/to/pretty/picture.jpg")
im.show()

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