If Django Filer does not create thumbnails ...

2014-04-04 | #django, #python, #solution, #ubuntu, #webdev

This is most likely the case, because there are missing imaging libraries, which are prerequisites for building PIL/Pillow in the first place and should therefore be installed beforehand. A Pillow installation with missing libs will succeed, but you'll see missing support messages at the very end.

This is a result that's functional:

--------------------------------------------------------------------
    PIL SETUP SUMMARY
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    version      Pillow 2.4.0
    platform     linux2 2.7.3 (default, Feb 27 2014, 20:00:17)
                 [GCC 4.6.3]
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    --- TKINTER support available
    --- JPEG support available
    *** OPENJPEG (JPEG2000) support not available
    --- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
    --- LIBTIFF support available
    --- FREETYPE2 support available
    --- LITTLECMS2 support available
    --- WEBP support available
    *** WEBPMUX support not available
    --------------------------------------------------------------------

To install these libraries under Ubuntu 12.04, use these commands, otherwise consult the link to the left.

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools
sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk
#if not already installed
pip install PIL
pip install Pillow

Update on other potential errors:

If PIL cannot be found (seems to be the case in (X)Ubuntu 14 e.g.) use this install:

pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL

Newer Debians/Ubuntus don't seem to find the libs, so you might have to symlink them:

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

Newer Debians/Ubuntus only search for freetype and not the current freetype2, so symlink this as well:

cd /usr/include/
ln -s freetype2 freetype

Globally you might have to use sudo for pip. Not entirely sure about this, some parts of the PIL install only seemed to work as super user.