Simple avatar crop example, test if PIL does work. If something went wrong, just pip uninstall PIL && pip uninstall pillow && pip install pillow.

pil_crop.py

from PIL import Image
import six
import sys


# from django-avatar
def create_thumbnail(filename, size, output):
    orig = open(filename)
    image = Image.open(orig)
    quality = 95
    w, h = image.size
    if w != size or h != size:
        if w > h:
            diff = int((w - h) / 2)
            image = image.crop((diff, 0, w - diff, h))
        else:
            diff = int((h - w) / 2)
            image = image.crop((0, diff, w, h - diff))

        if image.mode != "RGB":
            image = image.convert("RGB")

        image = image.resize((size, size), Image.ANTIALIAS)
        thumb = six.BytesIO()
        image.save(thumb, 'JPEG', quality=quality)

    image.save(output)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    filename, size, output = sys.argv[1], int(sys.argv[2]), sys.argv[3]
    create_thumbnail(filename, size, output)