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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I don't really want to defend ImageMagick, but does Pillow come anywhere close to it in terms of format support? A magnitude better performance is great, but sometimes you just need to operate on and convert strange files (X bitmaps, ASCII braille come to mind).

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ImageMagick has also better default handling. For example, in a previous project, we were automatically resizing jpeg images. Surprisingly, some resulting images were blurry. After some investigation, we found that these images had been photoshopped and Photoshop was using a different sampling factor (one of the variables used in jpeg compression). ImageMagick automatically detected this sampling factor and reused the same, but Pillow was using a default sampling factor and was blurring the image.

Did you submit a bug? We're using libjpeg, so the support for that functionality should be there.

There are a lot of formats, some of them are better exercised than others. It's not as complete as imagemagick, but we're getting one or two formats per release lately.

Many sites have a simple requirement of "allow user to upload a jpeg, resize it to create user profile pic for the user". No need to support anything but the most common formats for this, but you need security and you need speed of resizing.

You could make a hybrid solution where Pillow supported formation (which should be the vast majority of your input) go through its filters while other formats are run through ImageMagick to be converted into something Pillow understands so they can be stuffed into the front end.

If you support JPEG, PNG, and GIF you will have 99% of the user data supported. Very few people upload RLE TARGA to webpages these days.

Pillow does have Targa RLE support, but test coverage is sketchy.

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