[Zope] Python Imaging Library import problems

[Mike Salib]

Hi,
I'm a new Zoper. I've spent most of my day evangelizing at Phil
Greenspun's Database Backed Web Sites course and the rest of the day
trying to get the Python Imaging Library working as an external method.
Has anyone been able to do this? I'd like to be able to have an external
method that can create thumbnail images for Zope Image objects by using
their data attribute. It would be real handy for a site I'm designing
now.

My first problem was that whenever I tried referencing PIL's Image
module from an external method, I would get the Zope image class
instead. After clearing that up, I got error messages about PIL being
unable to decode file types, even though the exact same code works fine
when run from the command line. Eventually, I reduced my test external
method so all it does is import PIL and load an image file from the file
system (yes, I used binary mode). PIL still complains about not being
able to decode the file. I suspect that the problem may be that PIL
imports submodules on startup and caches them, but I'm too exhausted to
pursue this any further.

If anyone has gotten PIL to work with Zope, please let me know.

Thanks so much fellow Zopers,
Mike Salib

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