Hello guys, I had the same issue and it's due to PIL and the libraries needed to read jpeg. It worked fine with png for instance. Pillow has replaced pil, and we might as well remove pil. Remove PIL: *sudo pip uninstall pil* Install the required libraries: * sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk* Install/upgrade pillow : *sudo pip install pillow --upgrade* And your data.imread should work fine now. Hope this helps someone!