About the PIL Error -- IOError: decoder zip not available

The more detail installation PIL with zlib library in Ubuntu 64 bit :

http://obroll.com/install-python-pil-python-image-library-on-ubuntu-11-10-oneiric/

For the lazy (credits to @meawoppl for the apt-get):

$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev

sudo pip uninstall PIL
sudo pip install pillow

^^ fixed it for me.

Pillow is a fork of PIL that is compatible with pip/setuptools and gets a little better maintenance. ~~I haven't seen any API differences yet.~~

Edit: There is one notable API difference. PIL exposes Image as a top-level namespace, so you can

import Image # in PIL only

but

from PIL import Image  # in pillow or PIL

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