Error while installing Pillow on Windows – Building wheel for Pillow (pyproject.toml) ... error

[IrfanFathan]

What did you do?

I tried to install Pillow using:

pip install Pillow

What did you expect to happen?

Pillow should have installed successfully without errors.

What actually happened?

The installation failed with the following error:

Building wheel for Pillow (pyproject.toml) ... error
error: subprocess-exited-with-error

× Building wheel for Pillow (pyproject.toml) did not run successfully.

What are your OS, Python, and Pillow versions?

• OS: Windows 11
• Pillow: Not installed yet, as installation failed.

`

[radarhere]

Python: Run python --version

What does python --version output?

Rather than using pip install Pillow, could you try python -m pip install Pillow moving forward? Sometimes people have multiple versions of Python installed, and it confuses things.

The installation failed with the following error:
...
│ exit code: 1

Was there additional output after this?

[ajayita]

I'm having a similar issue. Probably exactly the same. Windows 11 etc.

pip3 install --upgrade setuptools wheel
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools in c:\users\thedude\appdata\local\programs\python\python313\lib\site-packages (75.8.1)
Requirement already satisfied: wheel in c:\users\thedude\appdata\local\programs\python\python313\lib\site-packages (0.45.1)
PS C:\Users\thedude> python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
Requirement already satisfied: pip in c:\users\thedude\appdata\local\programs\python\python313\lib\site-packages (25.0.1)
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools in c:\users\thedude\appdata\local\programs\python\python313\lib\site-packages (75.8.1)
Requirement already satisfied: wheel in c:\users\thedude\appdata\local\programs\python\python313\lib\site-packages (0.45.1)

pip cache purge
Files removed: 819 (412.1 MB)
PS C:\Users\thedude>

 pip install Pillow==10.1.0
Collecting Pillow==10.1.0
  Downloading Pillow-10.1.0.tar.gz (50.8 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 50.8/50.8 MB 17.4 MB/s eta 0:00:00
  Installing build dependencies ... done
  Getting requirements to build wheel ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error

  × Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [21 lines of output]
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\pyproject_hooks\_in_process\_in_process.py", line 389, in <module>
          main()
          ~~~~^^
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\pyproject_hooks\_in_process\_in_process.py", line 373, in main
          json_out["return_val"] = hook(**hook_input["kwargs"])
                                   ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\pyproject_hooks\_in_process\_in_process.py", line 143, in get_requires_for_build_wheel
          return hook(config_settings)
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-env-j3gbyr1y\overlay\Lib\site-packages\setuptools\build_meta.py", line 334, in get_requires_for_build_wheel
          return self._get_build_requires(config_settings, requirements=[])
                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-env-j3gbyr1y\overlay\Lib\site-packages\setuptools\build_meta.py", line 304, in _get_build_requires
          self.run_setup()
          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
        File "C:\Users\thedude\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-env-j3gbyr1y\overlay\Lib\site-packages\setuptools\build_meta.py", line 320, in run_setup
          exec(code, locals())
          ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        File "<string>", line 30, in <module>
        File "<string>", line 27, in get_version
      KeyError: '__version__'
      [end of output]

  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: subprocess-exited-with-error

× Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
│ exit code: 1
╰─> See above for output.

note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.

PS C:\Users\thedude> python --version
Python 3.13.1
PS C:\Users\thedude>

[radarhere]

Pillow 10.1 was released in October 2023 before Python 3.13 was released in October 2024, and so didn't offer support for it. See https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation/python-support.html

Is there a reason you don't want to install Pillow >= 11?