...

Also, BTW, I get the below test failure when I have matplotlib but no PIL installed. I think test_imread_url or the test right before it must be making some incorrect assumptions. (If I re-run the tests after this failure, then also all of the tifffile tests fail, so it seems that some test isn't doing proper teardown of the image loading plugins?)

That's quite possible--can you see how to fix that test as well?

No idea -- that's not setup or teardown code from freeimage... I assume I've noticed this only because everyone else has matplotlib + PIL installed, which I do not. I don't have time to go deeper into the plumbing right now, I'm afraid.