We have talked about modules and packages, using the terms interchangeably. However, there is a difference between a module and a package: packages are actually collections of modules and they include a __init__.py file, which can just be an empty file.

The dot-nomenclature used in modules to access specific functions or variables is also used in packages. This time, dotted names allow multiple modules within a package to be accessed without having name conflicts; each package creates its own namespace, and all the modules have their own namespaces.

When packages contain sub-packages (as in the following example), importing modules can be done with either absolute or relative paths. For example, to import the sepia.py module, one could import it with an absolute path: from video.effects.specialFX import sepia.