Importerror: No Module Named Pil

ImportError: No module named PIL

On some installs of PIL, you must do

import Image

instead of import PIL (PIL is in fact not always imported this way). Since import Image works for you, this means that you have in fact installed PIL.

Having a different name for the library and the Python module is unusual, but this is what was chosen for (some versions of) PIL.

You can get more information about how to use this module from the official tutorial.

PS: In fact, on some installs, import PIL does work, which adds to the confusion. This is confirmed by an example from the documentation, as @JanneKarila found out, and also by some more recent versions of the MacPorts PIL package (1.1.7).

No module named PIL' Visual Studio Code Error

This part is important:

If I run the file without vs code the module imports fine

If something like this happens, then you are not running the same python interpreter, because modules are always installed to specific installations of python that you have.

Do the following:

Add to your script the first two lines

import sys
print(sys.executable)

This will print the path to the python executable that is interpreting that script. If you now run this script with and without vs code, it should print two different python paths. Now you can install to the python interpreter that is being used by vs code specifically by typing

/path/to/python/used/by/vs/code/python -m pip install pillow

No Module named PIL

As per my comment since it helped you out and answered your problem:

The issue that you were seeing is that you had pip version 1.5.6, and the version of pip does dictate how packages are unzipped, which ultimately determines whether or not modules are loaded properly.

All that is needed is:

pip install --upgrade pip

Which allows pip to upgrade itself.

Use sudo if you're on Mac/Linux, otherwise you'll likely need to 'Run as Administrator' on Windows.

And voila, you can now properly import the PIL modules:

Python 2.7.12 (default, Jun 29 2016, 13:16:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.31)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PIL
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> Image
<module 'PIL.Image' from '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/Image.pyc'>

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PIL' in Thonny

As you said

This issue occurs only in the Thonny IDE, not in the Python shell or IDLE

Thonny uses Python 3.7.9, whereas I use Python 3.9 otherwise

Your issue happens almost certainly because you installed Pillow for Python 3.9 and not for 3.7. Judging from Thonny's documentation on installing packages you should be able to open a shell and do

python3.7 -m pip install Pillow

and then you'll be able to import Pillow in Thonny as well.

You can confirm which Python version the pip3 command is using using pip3 --version. For example on my Ubuntu system I have the system Python 3.8 and also Python 3.9, so I get this:

$ pip3 --version
pip 20.3.3 from /usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/pip (python 3.9)
$ python3.8 -m pip --version
pip 20.3.3 from /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/pip (python 3.8)

from PIL import Image - ImportError: No module named PIL

I was experiencing a similar issue. Fixed it by pip installing WITHOUT sudo.

pip install pillow

instead of

sudo pip install pillow

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