easy-thumbnails: InvalidImageFormatError: The source file does not appear to be an image

I’m getting the following error when trying to output a thumbnail in my Django template:

InvalidImageFormatError at /search/
The source file does not appear to be an image

This is happening with both JPEGs and PNGs. Here’s how my template looks:

{% load thumbnail %}
{% thumbnail profile.profile_photo 220x160 %}

I have THUMBNAIL_DEBUG = True in my settings file and easy_thumbnails added to my installed apps.

In my requirements.txt:

Pillow==2.2.1
easy-thumbnails==1.4

And before people say I don’t have png/jpeg support with Pillow/PIL here’s a pip install -r requirements.txt:

Installing collected packages: PIL
  Running setup.py develop for PIL

    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    PIL 1.2a0 SETUP SUMMARY
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    version       1.2a0
    platform      Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 10 2013, 06:20:15)
                  [GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    --- TKINTER support available
    --- JPEG support available
    *** WEBP support not available
    --- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
    --- FREETYPE2 support available
    *** LITTLECMS support not available
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    To add a missing option, make sure you have the required
    library, and set the corresponding ROOT variable in the
    setup.py script.

    To check the build, run the selftest.py script.
    Creating /home/robbie/git/myproject/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL.egg-link (link to .)
    PIL 1.2a0 is already the active version in easy-install.pth

So JPEG and PNG support are available. I’m also able to access the uploaded image from the browser by pointing to it’s MEDIA_URL path. What gives?

edit: I also get the same error when trying to load a 3rd party image such as

{% thumbnail "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/00000000000000000000000000000000?d=mm" 160x160 %}

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 10 years ago
Comments: 16 (3 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@robpodosek Any hints on solving this? I’m having the same issue right now.

JensDebergh on Jun 8, 2015

I recently had a similar issue, and i thought I’d share how i resolved my issue. Easy thumbnails uses easy_thumbnails.storage.ThumbnailFileSystemStorage as default storage set via THUMBNAIL_DEFAULT_STORAGE . This is usually fine during development and I change that for production. However during deployment if this value is not set properly the thumbnails will be generated using the default ThumbnailFileSystemStorage storage option however if you serve media files from a different location thumbnails cant locate the source files or thinks it has a thumbnail generated but cant find it , and throws the error. You can suppress this by setting THUMBNAIL_DEBUG to False while you diagnose the problem. if youve changed your DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE or STATICFILES_STORAGE or have set the storages option on a model field, you might have to configure THUMBNAIL_DEFAULT_STORAGE to find and serve the files properly

Joel-Edem on Apr 19, 2022

This happens to me as well, and is taking down the entire site with 2m monthly views. There should be a fallback image to avoid error 500.

Luc45 on Aug 14, 2017

This error should be silenced. It breaks the entire page, if an image has some form of damage or is incorrect. Instead, you should display a warning text or something similar. But breaking the entire page is too much for a simple error like this…

oesah on Feb 2, 2017

@MaykelLlanes could you please send me that image (if you can/use my private email) and tell me how you upload and access it.

You are using a templatetag (oscar_thumbnail ) I’m not familiar with, how does that error look like, if you use the native thumbnail templatetag provided with easy-thumbnails?

jrief on Nov 19, 2020