What it is
A Python library for images: open, rotate, shrink, save in another format, draw on top.
How we use it
In the gaming-club loyalty card it works with qrcode to draw the client's personal QR code, which the administrator scans to credit a visit.
Where it helps a business
- A bot or website has to assemble an image itself: a customer card with a QR code, a cover, a preview.
- Images need to be shrunk and re-saved so pages and messages stay light.
How we use it
In the gaming-club loyalty card Pillow works with the qrcode library to draw a customer's personal QR code. The customer shows it to the administrator, who scans it with a phone camera, and the bot opens the customer's profile to credit a night.
Common problems
- A phone photo lies on its side. A phone records the rotation in a camera tag instead of rotating the pixels. Without reading the tag a product photo would appear rotated, which is why the online store server rotates the frame by the tag, shrinks it and converts it to webp.
- Heavy images. A phone original weighs megabytes; the website and bot get a reduced copy.
When you do not need it
If a designer prepares the images and they do not change, there is no need to process them in code: compressing them once at upload is enough.