Pillow

Pillow is the friendly fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), providing comprehensive image processing capabilities for Python. Originally created by Fredrik Lundh as PIL in 1995 and forked as Pillow in 2010 by Alex Clark and Andrew Murray (to provide Python 3 support and binary distributions), Pillow has become the de facto image processing library in Python with over 12,300 stars as of 2026. The library supports opening, manipulating, and saving over 30 image formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, ICO, EPS, ICNS, AVIF (via pillow-avif-plugin), and raw camera formats (via pillow-heif for HEIF/HEIC). Key features include: pixel-level manipulation (getpixel, putpixel, and numpy array integration via np.asarray), geometric transformations (resize with multiple resampling filters: NEAREST, BILINEAR, BICUBIC, LANCZOS, HAMMING, BOX), rotation with expand and center options, cropping and pasting, image merging and splitting for multi-channel images, color space conversions (RGB, RGBA, CMYK, L (grayscale), HSV, YCbCr, LAB), image enhancement (brightness, contrast, color, sharpness adjustments), filtering (blur, GaussianBlur, box blur, sharpen, smooth, edge enhance, emboss, find edges, contour, median filter, mode filter, rank filter, min/max filters), text rendering with TrueType and OpenType font support (via FreeType), drawing primitives (lines, arcs, ellipses, rectangles, polygons, points, text), alpha compositing and blending, transparency handling, animated GIF and WebP support, and ICC profile management. As of 2026, version 11.x requires Python 3.9+.