[Answered ]-How to resize an image in Python without using Pillow

After days wasted, I’ve discovered the reason why Pillow isn’t installing. It’s not because the wheel is incompatible to the platform, but rather that pip is too old.

Azure is using pip version 1.5.6 at the moment – shame on them. This version doesn’t recognise wheels.

Here is how I fixed this:
Goto the Kudu DebugConsole:
https://[site_name].scm.azurewebsites.net/DebugConsole

Activate your VirtualEnv:
env\Scripts\activate

Note that if you run pip --version how old that version number is.
Now upgrade this by running:
python -m pip install -U pip
Note that you cannot upgrade the default pip in D:\Python27 as you don’t have access to it but you can upgrade your local pip inside fo the virtual environment.
Now run pip --version to ensure you are running the latest version (i.e. >=9.0.1).

Now inside of requirements.txt you can tell pip to look for wheels in specific folders by adding a line at the top such as:
--find-links requirements (which means it will search the requirements folder).
Here is how you create the Pillow wheel. You can run this locally or on the Kudu Console. If you run it locally ensure your python version matches what you use on Azure (2.7 or 3.X) and by default make sure you use a 32bit version.
pip install wheel (Only if you don’t have wheel installed)
pip wheel Pillow --wheel-dir=requirements
This will copy two files into your requirements folder: Pillow-X.whl and olefile-X.whl. Ensure these are added to your source control if you are deploying via git push. Push these to the server.

Now in the Kudu DebugConsole you can test the .whl files are there (after deploying) and test the installing by running:
pip install --no-index -r requirements.txt
This should now work and install Pillow!

When deploying pay close attention to if it says Found compatible virtual environment. or Creating python 2-7 virtual environment.. The former is what you want. But if you see the latter it means that the deploy has blasted your env folder and reset you back to pip 1.5.6. I don’t know why it does this sometimes, but try to make as few changes to the env folder as possible after deploying (i.e. just upgrade pip and thats it) to avoid this.