Scarpy recommands using Pillow instead of PIL to get image things done. But under Windows, if you install Pillow directly by

pip install pillow

, there will be an error while you download item images in Scrapy. The error is:

exceptions.IOError: decoder jpeg not available

If you are using Linux, the solution is very simple, just fix this by installing libjpeg and re-installing Pillow.

But under Windows, it is very exhausted to re-compile libjpeg with Pillow or PIL. In this suituation, I recommand to use pre-compiled PIL instead. Just install the pre-compiled PIL library, then you won’t get the above error.