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The Python Imaging Library archive
This domain published the Python Imaging Library and its documentation for many years. The pages are kept here for the people who still arrive looking for them.
What PIL was
The Python Imaging Library added image processing to Python: opening files in a long list of
formats, converting between them, resizing, filtering, and pushing pixels around directly. For
a long stretch it was simply how you did images in Python, and a great deal of code written
between 2000 and 2010 begins with import Image.
PIL's final release, 1.1.7, arrived in 2009. Development stopped afterwards, and the library does not run on modern Python versions.
What to use now
Pillow is the maintained fork and the answer for any new work. It kept the API close enough
that most old code needs only its imports changed, from import Image to
from PIL import Image, and it has been actively developed ever since. Anything
the archive documents about the imaging model, the band and mode system, or the filter
behaviour still broadly applies.
The archive itself
The handbook and reference pages are preserved as they were. They describe software that is no longer maintained, so treat them as history rather than as instructions: the concepts hold, the installation advice does not.
Why a tools site sits on the same domain
Because it is the same subject. The tools in the image section do in a browser what PIL did in a script: decode a file, change its size or format, encode it again. The vocabulary on those pages, bands and modes and resampling and quality, comes straight from this world.