How do I resize an image using PIL and maintain its aspect ratio?

I also recommend using PIL's thumbnail method, because it removes all the ratio hassles from you.

One important hint, though: Replace

im.thumbnail(size)

with

im.thumbnail(size,Image.ANTIALIAS)

by default, PIL uses the Image.NEAREST filter for resizing which results in good performance, but poor quality.

This script will resize an image (somepic.jpg) using PIL (Python Imaging Library) to a width of 300 pixels and a height proportional to the new width. It does this by determining what percentage 300 pixels is of the original width (img.size[0]) and then multiplying the original height (img.size[1]) by that percentage. Change "basewidth" to any other number to change the default width of your images.

from PIL import Image

basewidth = 300
img = Image.open('somepic.jpg')
wpercent = (basewidth/float(img.size[0]))
hsize = int((float(img.size[1])*float(wpercent)))
img = img.resize((basewidth,hsize), Image.ANTIALIAS)
img.save('somepic.jpg')

Define a maximum size. Then, compute a resize ratio by taking min(maxwidth/width, maxheight/height).

The proper size is oldsize*ratio.

There is of course also a library method to do this: the method Image.thumbnail.
Below is an (edited) example from the PIL documentation.

import os, sys
import Image

size = 128, 128

for infile in sys.argv[1:]:
    outfile = os.path.splitext(infile)[0] + ".thumbnail"
    if infile != outfile:
        try:
            im = Image.open(infile)
            im.thumbnail(size, Image.ANTIALIAS)
            im.save(outfile, "JPEG")
        except IOError:
            print "cannot create thumbnail for '%s'" % infile