Why bands instead of channels?

[iansebryk]

if i'm reading the docs correctly, the bands you refer to are image channels. as channel is long- and well-established terminology, may i ask why you chose to use band instead? and i appreciate this library has been around a while, but this is horribly confusing especially when using Pillow in a production pipeline... :P

[radarhere]

bands has been in use since PIL, before it was forked to Pillow, so I don't know the historical answer.

To change this would require updating Image.merge(), Image.getmodebandnames(), Image.getmodebands(), im.getbands() and ModeDescriptor. Pillow values backwards compatibility, and this would disrupt people who have accepted the current terminology. So unless this topic receives a lot of attention, there isn't a strong motivation to change.