I've had this problem since setting up GMG in December, just confirmed after an upgrade to 0.2.1: when I run ./bin/python setup.py develop --upgrade the process fails, and I get PIL errors when I attempt to run GMG and visit any image page.

Here is the PIL output from ./bin/python setup.py develop --upgrade:

Processing PIL-1.1.7.tar.gz
Running PIL-1.1.7/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-r9jp0l/PIL-1.1.7/egg-dist-tmp-jy3iuI
WARNING: '' not a valid package name; please use only.-separated package names in setup.py
_imaging.c: In function ‘init_imaging’:
_imaging.c:3253:15: warning: variable ‘d’ set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
PIL 1.1.7 SETUP SUMMARY
--------------------------------------------------------------------
version       1.1.7
platform      linux2 2.7.2+ (default, Oct  4 2011, 20:03:08)
              [GCC 4.6.1]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*** TKINTER support not available
*** JPEG support not available
*** ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support not available
*** FREETYPE2 support not available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To add a missing option, make sure you have the required
library, and set the corresponding ROOT variable in the
setup.py script.

To check the build, run the selftest.py script.
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
Image: module references __file__
Adding PIL 1.1.7 to easy-install.pth file
Installing pilfont.py script to /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/bin
Installing pilconvert.py script to /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/bin
Installing pildriver.py script to /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/bin
Installing pilfile.py script to /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/bin
Installing pilprint.py script to /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/bin

Installed /home/balleyne/bin/mediagoblin/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-i686.egg

I've been using a workaround. I have the python-imaging package installed in Ubuntu, so I just run rm -rf lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL-1.1.7-py2.7-linux-i686.egg/ and restart GMG, which I presume causes it to use the version of PIL I have installed system-wide, and everything works fine after that, but I'm not sure how to fix the setup.py PIL virtualenv install...

UTF-8 art: ​https://mediagoblin.com/u/aleksej/m/utf-8-test-for-the-upgraded-mg-com/

Thumbnail: ​https://mediagoblin.com/mgoblin_media/media_entries/4f36eaecd1d13f16d40002b3/thumbnail.png

Before the detection fix, thumbnails were generated in the ISO-8859-x encoding even if the encoding was detected correctly.

Current: "Added on 2011-02-14."

Better would be: "Added 1 month ago."

This also goes for comment timestamps, which are currently shown as "08:35PM 2012-02-09" which is all kinds of horrible.

I have no idea how to do this though. It might already be possible with the software we're using, who knows. It also wouldn't be hard to find a jQuery plugin such as ​http://timeago.yarp.com/, but I'm not sure if that's the right way to go.