Setting up PIL with libjpeg on Mac OS X Leopard

Background

For the past few months I've been playing around with Django, and it has come to a situation where I need Imaging Library to fulfill my project's requirements. In Python, it is handled with PIL. So, here's what I did to setup PIL with libjpeg support on Mac OS X Leopard.

Default vanilla Mac OS X install doesn't have libjpeg by default, so I need to install them first.

Methods of Installing PIL on Leopard

There are a few methods you can use to install PIL on Mac OS X, they are:

1. Install libjpeg from source, and then also install PIL from source
2. Use MacPorts / fink to install libjpeg and PIL automatically
3. Or, you can also install libjpeg from MacPorts, and then PIL from source

I decided to use the third approach. First of all, I'm still not confident to install library from source, and also I want to use binary form where as much as possible. Also, I didn't install everything from MacPorts even though they are available. My primary reason is, if I installed PIL from MacPorts, it will also install Python, which I don't want. Apple already included Python in the default install. If you prefer to use fink over MacPorts, you can also do this

Installation

1. Download MacPorts and run the installer
2. Install libjpeg by using these command lines: sudo port install jpeg. This will install libjpeg in "/opt/local/lib"
3. Download PIL from source from pythonware

4. Extract the file:

   $ tar zxvf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
   $ cd Imaging-1.1.6
   

5. Edit setup.py, and change the line JPEG_ROOT to: JPEG_ROOT = "/opt/local/lib/libjpeg.dylib"

6. Compile and build the source: sudo python setup.py install

The above step will install PIL package in "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/". This is the default directory where Python packages are located in Mac OS X.

Verify the Package

Now, here's what I did to check whether PIL was successfully installed on my computer.

In Python interpreter, I did the following:

% python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Nov 12 2008, 17:08:51)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
>>> import Image
>>> image = Image.open("/Users/rezmuh/test-image.jpg")
>>> image.save("/Users/rezmuh/pil-image.jpg")
>>> ^D

If there is no error and you can see the new image copied from an old image, then congratulations, PIL is successfully installed :)

If you know any simpler ways to install PIL, please let me know