Import error when running pyinstaller app

I have written a Python app which makes use of:

from PIL import Image

I want to distribute a packed version of this application so that whoever uses it does not need to install all the dependencies.

For that I have used pyinstaller, without much success. I run:

> pyinstaller --onefile image_download.py

and it does not complain. However, when I run the application, I get:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 26, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyInstaller/loader/pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_module
    exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
  File "/home/ic/twitter-project/build/image_download/out00-PYZ.pyz/PIL.PngImagePlugin", line 40, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyInstaller/loader/pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_module
    exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
  File "/home/ic/twitter-project/build/image_download/out00-PYZ.pyz/PIL.Image", line 63, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name _imaging

I am using:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• Python 2.7
• pyinstaller 2.1
• PIL.VERSION 1.1.7 (although I thought I had installed Pillow 2.8.1)

The script works fine running as python image_download.py, but pyinstaller is not being able to import _imaging, for some reason.

Any suggestions?

Finally I could not use pyinstaller for this, since I could not fix the import problem.

I managed to build a standalone executable with Nuitka and bbfreeze, though, so in case anyone runs into the same problem: it is worth trying other tools.