ImportError: cannot import name _imaging

I had the same problem and I solved that by upgrading this package using the command below:

pip install -U Pillow

I ran into this problem as well. It can happen if you have PIL installed, then install Pillow on top of it.

Go to /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ and delete anything with "PIL" in the name (including directories). If the Pillow .egg file is there you might as well delete that too. Then re-install Pillow.

substitute "python2.7" for the version of python you're using.

This also happens if you built Pillow in one OS and then copied the contents of site-packages to another one. For example, if you are creating AWS Lambda deployment package, that's the error you will face when running the Lambda function. If that's the case, then Pillow needs to be installed in a Amazon Linux instance and you have to use the resulting site-packages in your deployment package. See instructions and details here:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-s3-example-deployment-pkg.html