Shoud we use PIL or Pillow?

[Gribouillis]

Which of the two should we use and why?

My Kubuntu 22.04 OS comes with python3-pil installed. Can I install python3-pillow and use both of them?

[snippsat]

You only use Pillow.
Original maintainers of the PIL stopped working on it a long time⏲ ago.
Pillow is repackaged(drop-in replacement) and much updated version of original PIL
Still use PIl in import as in original just to keep backward compatible.

from PIL import Image

img = Image.open('image.png').convert('L')
img.save('greyscale.png')

My Kubuntu 22.04 OS comes with python3-pil installed. Can I install python3-pillow and use both of them?

I would not use OS install at all,they may not be updated.
Just use pip.

pip install Pillow --upgrade

[Gribouillis]

Just use pip.

I did that and it seems to work well

Output:
λ python -m pip install Pillow --upgrade                                                   
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable               
Requirement already satisfied: Pillow in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (9.0.1)             
Collecting Pillow                                                                           
  Downloading Pillow-9.2.0-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl (3.2 MB)                   
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 3.2/3.2 MB 8.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00               
Installing collected packages: Pillow                                                       
Successfully installed Pillow-9.2.0                                                         
λ python                                                                                   
Python 3.10.4 (main, Jun 29 2022, 12:14:53) [GCC 11.2.0] on linux                           
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.                      
>>> import PIL                                                                              
>>> PIL                                                                                     
<module 'PIL' from '/home/eric/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py'>        
>>> 
λ python -m PIL                                                                            
--------------------------------------------------------------------                        
Pillow 9.2.0                                                                                
Python 3.10.4 (main, Jun 29 2022, 12:14:53) [GCC 11.2.0]
...

[snippsat]

I did that and it seems to work well

Works fine🎈