An article posted 7th Nov 2013 should not be recommending use of PIL (a dead project) over Pillow, imo. The only reference to Pillow in the article is a link at the bottom to the Pillow tutorial.
Upvote for Pillow. For those of you who don't know, Pillow is a fork of PIL that is:
- Pip/setuptools compatible
- Python 3 compatible
- Has more regular releases.
This is a great example of what to do when an open source project is getting behind on the times. PIL was having bi-year releases and installation was a headache, so someone forked it and made it better.
I know Django isn't end all, be all, but with them moving forward towards 1.8 where PIL will be completely depreciated, that's really the first nail in the coffin for PIL.
No one's asked for it that I've heard, so it's not in the plans.
I'd consider adding DNG if there's a good external library. The individual camera raws, that's more of a thankless task with how fast they change/multiply.
Not directed at you, but why do camera makers continue to reinvent RAW formats for new models? Isn't this a 'solved' problem with Adobe's DNG being royalty free and all?
When I got a D800 around launch time, even Lightroom didn't have the capability to import them directly at launch and I had to convert them to DNGs first. What a bloddy mess.
There are many rants about that. It's not so much that the formats change, it's that they keep adding tags that mean something within the formats. Oddly enough, of the ones that I've looked at, they can (generally) be interpreted as a tiff file if you squint at them correctly. (not that a tiff file is any better. It's not called Thousands of Incompatible File Formats for nothing).
But once you have that file format, camera manufacturers tend to embed hunks of data in the raw file about settings and other things that the camera knows about the image, like the focus points, white balance, camera calibration, image compression, dot layout and all that.
I'd like to leave that as Someone Else's Problem. (unless there's a lot of money and shiny cameras in it for me)
> I'd consider adding DNG if there's a good external library.
Can you guys just call OS libraries? There are RAW librarys available for Windows and OS X. A thin wrapper would be nice. I really hate to compile >20MB external shared libraries myself.
I'd prefer one library that works across all three major platforms, but if someone wants to send a pull request to add os dependent ones, I'd check those out.
I tried to install PIL the other day via `pip` I believe, and a warning appeared basically saying PIL is not being maintained (is dead), use an alternative.
I'm curious what problems you faced with PIL on Pip. I never tried installing it before today at work on Travis using Pip. Despite of all system libraries (jpeg-dev, zlib-dev) installed it would complain about libraries not being present and compiled without png/jpeg... support.
It's amusing to me that he ignores pillow for the whole piece and then links to the tutorial I ported to the pillow docs from the PIL handbook just a few weeks ago.
This is a great example of what to do when an open source project is getting behind on the times. PIL was having bi-year releases and installation was a headache, so someone forked it and made it better.