title: Python PIL load throwing AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'read'
body: <p>I've been struggling with this error for several days with little headway.  Basically, I'm trying to read in an image file and then use PIL to preform a specific operation on it.  (my end goal is to preform a PIL paste operation). </p>
  
  <p>However, whenever I load my image in, and then invoke the load() method on it (operations like show(), paste(), resize(), etc. all invoke the load() method), I get a weird NoneType has no attribute read error.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm using PIL 1.1.7 and have reproduced this error on both OSX 10.6 and Ubuntu 10.04. Below is the most basic ipython code that I can enter to produce the error.  </p>
  
  <p>Has anyone see this type of situation before?</p>
  
  <p>Any help is much appreciated.</p>
  
  <pre><code>In [1]: import os
  In [2]: try:
     ...:     from PIL import Image
     ...: except ImportError:
     ...:     import Image
     ...: 
  In [3]: from django.conf import settings
  In [4]: bgImageFileHash = "d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e"
  In [5]: bgImageFilePath = os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT,'uploads',"%s.jpg" % (bgImageFileHash)) 
  In [6]: print bgImageFilePath 
  ------&gt; print(bgImageFilePath )
  /Users/test/Sites/env/mysite/proj/mysite/../mysite/media/uploads/d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e.jpg
  In [7]: bgImageImage=Image.open(bgImageFilePath)
  In [8]: bgImageImage.verify()
  In [9]: bgImageImage.load()
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
  /Users/test/Sites/env/mysite/proj/mysite/&lt;ipython console&gt; in &lt;module&gt;()
  /Users/test/Sites/env/mysite/lib/python2.6/site-packages/PIL/ImageFile.pyc in load(self)
      168             read = self.load_read
      169         except AttributeError:
  --&gt; 170             read = self.fp.read
      171 
      172         try:
  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'read'
  </code></pre>