PIL vs imagemagick

[Will Kahn-Greene]

We're having some issues with getting PIL installed into the
development environment. Chris talked with the deviantart folks and
discovered they're not using PIL--they're using imagemagick.

This issue is for the following:


1. researching the pros/cons of switching
2. checking to see if there are other options
3. if it seems like a good idea and the other options aren't
   enticing, looking at switching GNU MediaGoblin over to using
   imagemagick
4. if 3 happens, then updating all the docs

[Christopher Allan Webber]

If we are doing imagemagick (good idea) we'll probably need to
implement
`http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/303 <http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/303>`_
for when the queuing storage systems are remote.

[Elrond]

meeting result:
[C cwebber] Imagemagick support

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Moving this to low because PIL seems to be working okay for now.

The one issue seems to be that Windows users have some problem with
PIL?

[Will Kahn-Greene]

We release 0.0.4, so I'm bumping this to 0.0.5.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Updated to suggest installing PIL. Easier than dealing with
development header rigamarule.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Arg! Updated the wrong ticket!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Imagemagick might still be a good idea. Before we can move forward
with this though, we have to figure out a safe way to do it.
Options afaict are:


-  Use one of the wrapper libraries. There are a few of them, I
   don't have them listed here offhand. But they seem like they might
   be fragile... I'm not sure.
-  Use the command line using subproces.Popen. Supposedly safe
   because the args are in a list and also it doesn't run a shell. Is
   it safe enough?
-  Use ctypes to bind to imagemagick on our own.

We also want to see: just how much faster is it? Fast enough to
switch? I suspect yes...

[Will Kahn-Greene]

The original url for this bug was ​http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/332 .
Relations:
#140: related

[Elrond]

As this is low prio, we likely wont handle this for the next release.

[Will Kahn-Greene]

There's another package called "pillow" which is PIL, but with better packaging. We could also switch to that.

• ​http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/1.7.7

[Will Kahn-Greene]

I'm going to close this out since no one is interested in taking it on and the project has done fine without this work. If it's an issue, we can open up a new one.