Python Image Library fails with message "decoder JPEG not available" - PIL

Question

PIL does support JPEG in my system.

Whenever I do an upload, my code is failing with:

File "PIL/Image.py", line 375, in _getdecoder
    raise IOError("decoder %s not available" % decoder_name)
IOError: decoder jpeg not available

How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

libjpeg-dev is required to be able to process jpegs with pillow (or PIL), so you need to install it and then recompile pillow. It also seems that libjpeg8-dev is needed on Ubuntu 14.04

If you're still using PIL then you should really be using pillow these days though, so first pip uninstall PIL before following these instructions to switch, or if you have a good reason for sticking with PIL then replace "pillow" with "PIL" in the below).

On Ubuntu:

# install libjpeg-dev with apt
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
# if you're on Ubuntu 14.04, also install this
sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev

# reinstall pillow
pip install --no-cache-dir -I pillow

If that doesn't work, try one of the below, depending on whether you are on 64bit or 32bit Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu x64:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib

Or for Ubuntu 32bit:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/

Then reinstall pillow:

pip install --no-cache-dir -I pillow

(Edits to include feedback from comments. Thanks Charles Offenbacher for pointing out this differs for 32bit, and t-mart for suggesting use of --no-cache-dir).