PermissionError: [WinError 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

Your process is the one that has the file open (via im still existing). You need to close it first before deleting it.

I don't know if PIL supports with contexts, but if it did:

import os
from PIL import Image

while True:    
    img_dir = r"C:\Users\Harold\Google Drive\wallpapers"
    for filename in os.listdir(img_dir):
        filepath = os.path.join(img_dir, filename)
        with Image.open(filepath) as im:
            x, y = im.size
        totalsize = x*y
        if totalsize < 2073600:
            os.remove(filepath)

This will make sure to delete im (and close the file) before you get to os.remove.

If it doesn't you might want to check out Pillow, since PIL development is pretty much dead.


I was running into the same problem, but the error was intermittent. If you are coding your file open/close correctly and still running into this error, make sure you are not synching the files with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. I paused Dropbox and I no longer see the error.


This is basically permission error, you just need to close the file before removing it. After getting the image size info, close the image with

im.close()