This article is about the Raspberry Pi Imager, the newly launched Imager utility developed by the Raspberry Pi organization.

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After you buy a Raspberry Pi and other accessories, the first thing you will need is to write an OS image into the SD card. For writing the OS image we have a lot of tools and software. The selection of these tools is not an easy task. Until now we had tools like balenaEtcher for Linux and Win32DiskImager and imgFlasher for Windows as recommended by Raspberry Pi documents.

Now there’s one more tool added to the list, the“Raspberry Pi Imager”. Yes, we had lots of options for writing an OS image into the SD card, this is very easy to use and official. The Raspberry Pi Imager is based on QT5 so it’s installation may not be that easy.

The best part of Raspberry Pi Imager is that it is an Open Source utility available under the terms of the Apache license.

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Introduction

The interface is similar to balenaEtcher, but it is faster than the other tools we used earlier. The imaging process is divided into 3 steps, choose an OS -> Choose the SD Cards -> Write.

The Raspberry Pi Imager will download a “.JSON” file from the official Raspberry Pi website with a list of all updated download options.

After the OS selection is finished, you will need to select the SD card. The Imager will automatically fetch the image from the website and will write the image to the SD card.

The Raspberry Pi Imager will cache the downloaded operating system image so that if you write an image to another SD card no further downloading will be required.