using PILLOW on App Engine instead of PIL

Question

It turns out that PIL seems to have a problem of over-estimating the height of fonts. I've encountered this problem with PIL on App Engine. See more about this problem here

however, i don't have this problem with PILLOW on my local machine. i can kind of work around this problem, but ideally I'd use PILLOW instead of PIL on app engine. Is that possible?

Answer 1

No. PIL uses C based modules and so does PILLOW. You can only deploy supported modules as listed in 3rd party modules (like numpy) that have C based libraries see - https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/libraries27

Answer 2

If you really need it, you can use a Managed VM and setup the libraries you want, including C based python libraries such as pillow.

Not that this is a simple solution. It affects scaling time (milliseconds to minutes according to google), cost (you pay for Cloud Compute Engine), and setup (you have to specify the right Docker container).

But it can be done.