IOError decoder zip not available

Question

I'm trying to get up and running with sorl thumbnail but I'm getting an error "decoder zip not available".

I have read through a ton of similar pages saying that it is a PIL / Pilow issue.

I have tried re-installing pil via:

easy_install http://dist.plone.org/thirdparty/PIL-1.1.7.tar.gz

As well as:

pip uninstall PIL Pillow
pip install Pillow
pip install PIL

I read that Ubuntu uses a directory called /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu for x64 architectures. If you are using that architecture you need to create a symbolic link for that as well as for other shared libraries.

$ sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 /lib/libz.so

Additional info:

OS: Ubuntu Precice

I have not tried installing the package zlib from source which some others have also mentioned worked for them.

Furthermore

1. You don't need BOTH PIL and Pillow, only one of these (Pillow is better IMHO) – Narrows

2. What does PIL/Pillow install says in the end of output about PNG support? – Narrows

3. If PNG support is not available - you will need to install zlib1g-dev before compiling it – Narrows

Answer 1

I found two solutions for this that worked for me.

The first way that worked for me was to use a different imaging library all together. I installed pgmagic and that worked fine.

  sudo apt-get install libgraphicsmagick++-dev
  sudo apt-get install libboost-python1.40-dev

There is also other imaging libraries available and they are all listed in the sorl-thumbnail docs:

http://sorl-thumbnail.readthedocs.org/en/latest/requirements.html

The second way that worked for me (preferred) was literally a fresh install of everything where I removed both pillow and PIL and the re-installed them starting with pillow.

pip uninstall pillow
pip uninstall PIL

pip install pillow
pip install PIL

Furthermore