# Porting

Porting existing PIL-based code to Pillow

Pillow is a functional drop-in replacement for the Python Imaging Library.

PIL is Python 2 only. Pillow dropped support for Python 2 in Pillow 7.0. So if you would like to run the latest version of Pillow, you will first and foremost need to port your code from Python 2 to 3.

To run your existing PIL-compatible code with Pillow, it needs to be modified to import the `Image` module from the `PIL` namespace instead of the global namespace. Change this:

    import Image

to this:

    from PIL import Image

The `PIL._imaging` module has been moved to `PIL.Image.core`. You can now import it like this:

    from PIL.Image import core as _imaging

The image plugin loading mechanism has changed. Pillow no longer automatically imports any file in the Python path with a name ending in `ImagePlugin.py`. You will need to import your image plugin manually.

Pillow will raise an exception if the core extension can’t be loaded for any reason, including a version mismatch between the Python and extension code. Previously PIL allowed Python only code to run if the core extension was not available.