Simon Willison’s Weblog

pillow-simd (via) A “friendly fork” of the Python Pillow image library that takes advantage of SIMD operations on certain CPUs to obtain massive speed-ups—they claim 16 to 40 times faster than ImageMagick.

# 14th November 2017, 9:42 pm / pil, python

Installing PIL on Mac OS X Snow Leopard for use in Google App Engine. PIL installation instructions that actually work... the ’export CC=“gcc -arch i386”’ incantation in particular. Make sure you run setup.py install using the Python version that the App Engine dev tools are using (I ran “sudo /usr/bin/python2.6 setup.py install”).

# 15th March 2010, 4:06 pm / osx, pil, python, snowleopard

Load Windows ICO files. Apparently PIL has trouble with the most recent versions of the windows .ico format (Vista now embeds PNG images in them)—this clever function deals with the differences and gives back a PIL Image object.

# 17th January 2009, 9:48 pm / ico, images, pil, png, python, vista, windows

sorl-thumbnail. This looks like a decent attempt at a generic Django thumbnailing service, but I’m always wary of code that allows URL hackers to create large numbers of files that will be cached to disk. UPDATE: My mistake, thumbnail creation can only be caused by template authors.

# 27th November 2007, 7:17 pm / django, pil, python, thumbnails, urls