PILPillow

Pillow, sometimes referred to as PIL or PILPillow, is an open-source Python library for opening, manipulating, and saving many image file formats. It is a maintained fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), which was originally developed by Fredrik Lundh. Pillow provides a high-level API that remains compatible with code written for PIL, and is the de facto standard for image processing in Python.

Key features include opening image files, querying and modifying pixels, resizing, cropping, rotating, and applying filters. It also supports color space conversions, alpha transparency, drawing shapes and text, image enhancements, and working with EXIF metadata. Pillow can read and write a wide range of formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and WebP, depending on optional external libraries.

Implementation and usage: Pillow is installable via pip (pip install Pillow). After installation, you typically import as from PIL import Image, and use a PIL-like API to perform operations. It is compatible with major operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux) and supports Python 3.x.

History and license: Pillow is the actively maintained fork of PIL, which fell out of active development around 2011. Pillow is open source under a permissive license derived from the PIL Software License, and its source code is hosted on platforms like GitHub.

Applications and ecosystem: The library is widely used in web frameworks, data science pipelines, and automation scripts to handle image processing tasks, including resizing uploaded images, creating thumbnails, or applying image transformations.