Installing PIL (Python Imaging Library) in Win7 64 bits, Python 2.6.4

Solution 1:

I found a working win7 binary here: Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages It's from Christoph Gohlke at UC Irvine. There are binaries for python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 , 3.1 and 3.2 for both 32bit and 64 bit windows.

There are a whole lot of other compiled packages here, too.

Be sure to uninstall your old PILfirst. If you used easy_install: easy_install -mnX pil
And then remove the egg in python/Lib/site-packages

Be sure to remove any other failed attempts. I had moved the _image dll into Python*.*/DLLs and I had to remove it.

Solution 2:

I've just had the same problem (with Python 2.7 and PIL for this versions, but the solution should work also for 2.6) and the way to solve it is to copy all the registry keys from:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Python

to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Python

Worked for me

solution found at the address below so credits should go there: http://effbot.slinkset.com/items/Adding_Python_Information_to_the_Windows_Registry

Solution 3:

Compiling PIL on Windows x64 is apparently a bit of a pain. (Well, compiling anything on Windows is a bit of a pain in my experience. But still.) As well as PIL itself you'll need to build many dependencies. See these notes from the mailing list too.

There's an unofficial precompiled binary for x64 linked from this message, but I haven't tried it myself. Might be worth a go if you don't mind the download being from one of those slightly dodgy file-upload sites. Other than that... well, you could always give up and instead the 32-bit Python binary instead.