image - Python: The _imagingft C module is not installed

Question

I've tried lots of solution that posted on the net, they don't work.

>>> import _imaging
>>> _imaging.__file__
'C:\\python26\\lib\\site-packages\\PIL\\_imaging.pyd'
>>>

So the system can find the _imaging but still can't use truetype font

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFilter, ImageFont


im = Image.new('RGB', (300,300), 'white')
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
font = ImageFont.truetype('arial.ttf', 14)
draw.text((100,100), 'test text', font = font)

Raises this error:

ImportError: The _imagingft C module is not installed

File "D:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\PIL\ImageFont.py", line 34, in __getattr__
  raise ImportError("The _imagingft C module is not installed")

Answer 1

Your installed PIL was compiled without libfreetype.

You can get precompiled installer of PIL (compiled with libfreetype) here (and many other precompiled Python C Modules):

http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

Answer 2

On Ubuntu, you need to have libfreetype-dev installed before compiling PIL.

i.e.

$ sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
$ sudo -s
\# pip uninstall pil
\# pip install --no-cache-dir pil

PS! Running pip install as sudo will usually install packages to /usr/local/lib on most Ubuntu versions. You may consider to install Pil in a virtual environment (virtualenv or venv) in a path owned by the user instead.

You may also consider installing pillow instead of pil, which I believe is API compatible: https://python-pillow.org. Note that Pillow also requires libfreetype-dev and you might need to follow the same uninstall/install steps if libfreetype-dev was not present during the initial installation.

Answer 3

The following worked for me on Ubuntu 14.04.1 64 bit:

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

Then, in the virtualenv:

pip uninstall pillow
pip install --no-cache-dir pillow

Answer 4

solution for CentOS 6 (and probably other rpm based):

yum install freetype-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel

pip uninstall pil Pillow
pip install pil Pillow

Answer 5

In OS X, I did this to solve the problem:

pip uninstall PIL
ln -s /usr/X11/include/freetype2 /usr/local/include/
ln -s /usr/X11/include/ft2build.h /usr/local/include/
ln -s /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib /usr/local/lib/
ln -s /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.dylib
pip install PIL

Answer 6

Basically, you need to install freetype before installing PIL.

If you're using Homebrew on OS X it's just a matter of:

brew remove pil
brew install freetype
brew install pil

Answer 7

Worked for Ubuntu 12.10:

sudo pip uninstall PIL
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
sudo apt-get install python-imaging

Answer 8

For OS X (I'm running 10.6 but should work for others) I was able to get around this error using the advice from this post. Basically you need to install a couple of the dependencies then reinstall PIL.

Answer 9

For me none of the solutions posted here so far has worked. I found another solution here: http://codeinthehole.com/writing/how-to-install-pil-on-64-bit-ubuntu-1204/

First install the dev packages:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev libjpeg-dev libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev

Then create some symlinks:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/

Afterwards PIL should compile just fine:

$ pip install PIL --upgrade

Answer 10

The followed works on ubuntu 12.04:

pip uninstall PIL
apt-get install libjpeg-dev
apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev
pip install PIL --upgrade

when your see "-- JPEG support avaliable" that means it works.

But, if it still doesn't work when your edit your jpeg image, check the python path!!
My python path missed '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/', so I edit the ~/.bashrc add the following code to this file:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/

then, finally, it works!!

Answer 11

Ubuntu 11.10 installs zlib and freetype2 libraries following the multi-arch spec (e.g. /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu). You may use PIL setup environment variables so it can find them. However it only works on PIL versions beyond the pil-117 tag.

export PIL_SETUP_ZLIB_ROOT=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
export PIL_SETUP_FREETYPE_ROOT=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
pip install -U PIL

Since your multi-arch path may be different (x86-64), it's preferable to install the -dev packages and use pkg-config to retrieve the correct path.

pkg-config --variable=libdir zlib
pkg-config --variable=libdir freetype2

Another way given by Barry on Pillow's setup.py is to use dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH to obtain the proper library directory suffix.

See https://bitbucket.org/effbot/pil-2009-raclette/issue/18

Answer 12

I used homebrew to install freetype and I have the following in /usr/local/lib:

libfreetype.6.dylib libfreetype.a libfreetype.dylib

But the usual:

pip install pil

Does not work for me, so I used:

pip install http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz

Answer 13

In my Mac, the following steps in terminal works:

$ brew install freetype
$ sudo pip uninstall pil
$ sudo pip install pillow

hopes it works for you. Good luck!

Answer 14

Instead of running: pip install Pillow

Run: pip install Image

darwin Big Sur pyenv

Answer 15

【solved】
In my ubuntu12.04, after I installed python-imaging using apt-get, it works.