The Python Imaging Library (PIL) is a free library for the Python programming language that adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving many different image file formats. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The latest version of PIL is Pillow, which is a fork of PIL that adds some user-friendly features.

Here’s how you can use it:

1. Installation: Install it using pip:

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   pip install pillow

2. Usage: Here’s a simple example of opening, manipulating and saving an image:

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   from PIL import Image # Open an image file img = Image.open('example.jpg') # Display the image img.show() # Apply a filter from PIL import ImageFilter img_blurred = img.filter(ImageFilter.BLUR) # Save the new image img_blurred.save('example_blurred.jpg')

With Pillow, you can also create thumbnails, convert between different file formats, apply various image filters, and much more. It’s a very flexible and powerful library for handling images in Python.

Please note that PIL/Pillow does not support some of the newer image formats, like WebP, by default. For these formats, you may need additional libraries or tools. Also, for more complex image processing tasks, you might want to consider using libraries like OpenCV.