How to add border to an image using pillow in python

The PIL library

PIL or Python imaging library is an image processing library in Python. This library supports a wide range of file formats, is designed for an efficient internal representation of image data, and provides powerful image processing capabilities.

The ImageOps module

The ImageOps module in PIL contains ‘ready-made’ image processing operations and most operations only work on L (grayscale or single channel image) and RGB images.

The expand function

The expand function is used to add a border to the image.

Syntax

PIL.ImageOps.expand(image, border=0, fill=0)

Parameter

  • image: It is the image to expand or add the border to.
  • border: It is the width of the border in pixels.
  • fill: It is the border color.

Code example

Let’s look at the code below:

from PIL import Image, ImageOps
img = Image.open('tree.png')
img_with_border = ImageOps.expand(img, border=50, fill='red')
img_with_border.save('output/tree-with-border.png')

Code explanation

  • Line 1: We import the ImageFilter and Image modules.
  • Line 3: We read man.png into memory using open() in Image module.
  • Line 5: We use the expand() method and add a red color (fill) border of size 30 to the image.
  • Line 7: We then save the image with the border to the disk.

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