Plone is not loading images or resized images are not available is usually caused by broken PIL installation: PIL used by Python virtual machine driving Plone does not have proper native libraries (libjpeg) available to perform imaging operations.
If you run Zope on foreground you usually see errors like this:
2009-10-22T17:31:04 ERROR Archetypes None
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/xxx/xxx/parts/plone/Archetypes/Field.py", line 2333, in createScales
imgdata, format = self.scale(data, w, h)
File "/home/xxx/xxx/parts/plone/Archetypes/Field.py", line 2382, in scale
image.thumbnail(size, self.pil_resize_algo)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/Image.py", line 1523, in thumbnail
self.load()
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/ImageFile.py", line 155, in load
self.load_prepare()
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/ImageFile.py", line 223, in load_prepare
self.im = Image.core.new(self.mode, self.size)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/Image.py", line 36, in __getattr__
raise ImportError("The _imaging C module is not installed")
ImportError: The _imaging C module is not installed
In the above case PYTHONPATH incorrectly tries to load Python 2.5 libraries, though Plone 3.x exclusively uses Python 2.4. In this case the proper fix is to clean-up damaged start up scripts in bin/ folder:
xxx@xxx:~/xxx/bin$ grep -Ri "python2.5" *
buildout: '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages',
instance: '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages',
zopepy: '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages',
This can be achieved by
For further debugging the problem you can start the particular Python interpreter and try to import _imaging yourself.
Run Python in verbose mode to print all imports (the example below has been shortened):
(python-2.4)moo@murskaamo:~/isleofback$ python -v
Python 2.4.6 (#1, Jul 16 2010, 10:31:46)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import _imaging
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: libjpeg.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
>>> exit
In this case we have a custom Python build based on collective.buildout.python recipe. It will compile us a custom libjpeg version and should not use OS libjpeg:
(python-2.4)moo@murskaamo:~/code/python$ find . -iname libjpeg*
./python-2.4/lib/libjpeg.la
./python-2.4/lib/libjpeg.so.8
./python-2.4/lib/libjpeg.so
./python-2.4/lib/libjpeg.so.8.0.2
./python-2.4/lib/libjpeg.a
However, looks like this libjpeg does not end up in the OS LD_LIBRARY_PATH import list automatically.
For more information see
Example how to do it with system-wide Python:
wget http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/JohnCarrollGilbertStuart.jpg
python2.4
import PIL
from PIL import Image
im = Image.open("JohnCarrollGilbertStuart.jpg")
im.thumbnail((64, 64), Image.ANTIALIAS)
im.save("test.jpg")
No exceptions should be risen.
You can do the same thing in Zope console, started by:
bin/instance debug