Raspberry PI Imager: Official Micro SD Flashing Tool for OS Installation

Last Updated on 21st August 2025 by peppe8o

This tutorial will show you how to use the Raspberry PI Imager tool to prepare your Raspberry PI computer board for your projects. Please note that this tutorial will apply for all the Raspberry PI computer boards, as the Raspberry PI Pico is a microcontroller (not a computer) and this requires you to start from a different approach with First steps with Raspberry PI Pico for Beginners.

Every Raspberry Pi project always starts with OS installation by flashing the Micro-SD card. There are several ways to flash an OS image for Raspberry Pis, as using Balena Etcher or Win32DiskImager. In 2022 the Raspberry PI company released its own Raspberry PI Imager to prepare micro SD cards.

Trying it is a must for Raspberry PI lovers.

To prepare a Raspberry PI’s Operating System, you need an external computer where to install and run the Raspberry PI Imager. I will refer to this external computer as “remote computer”.

With this software installed, you will be able to prepare the micro-SD card for your Raspberry PI computer board, where you will flash your preferred OS image.

Install the Raspberry PI Imager

Raspberry Pi Imager is available for 3 Platforms: Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. Please download the software installer from Raspberry Pi download page and install it according to your OS.

Raspberry PI Imager Usage

Using the Raspberry PI Imager is very simple and intuitive. After the software installation completes, please run the Raspberry PI Imager from your remote computer. You will get the default screen, already translated into your language according to your remote computer language settings. Please note that if you want to run it in a different language, you must change the language settings for your remote computer system-wide.

Device Filtering

The first button allows you to filter the available Operating Systems to install by selecting the Raspberry PI computer model you have. By clicking the “CHOOSE DEVICE” button, the Raspberry PI imager will show you the list of all the Raspberry PI computer models, where you can easily select your one:

Usually, it is important to select OSes which support the CPU architecture of your computer model, as the oldest Raspberry Pi models integrate old ARM versions. With the latest Raspberry PI models, you can select the “No Filtering” option as they should support all the OS Images.

After you select “No Filtering” or your Raspberry PI model, the software will bring you back to the software’s home page.

Select the Operating System

With the second button, “CHOOSE OS”, you can select from a wide number of options offered by the Raspberry PI.

Raspberry PI OS Options

At the beginning of the list, you will find the official Raspberry PI OS, which is the Raspberry PI OS with a Desktop environment and a restricted set of applications already installed. This is what you can find in my Install Raspberry PI OS Desktop (with optional Remote Desktop) tutorial.

NOTE: For each Raspberry PI OS, you will find the 64-bit, the 32-bit, and the legacy version.

The 64-bit and 32-bit are built on the latest Debian distribution (Bookworm at the date of this post), while the Legacy is built on the previous Debian distribution (Bullseye at the date of this post). The legacy version is intended for those people requiring it for compatibility issues with specific problems, so in most cases, you can opt for the latest version.

After these first options, you will have a list of sub-menus where you can select more specific Operating Systems.

The Raspberry PI OS (other) will allow you to install the Raspberry PI OS Lite ot the Raspberry PI OS Full. You can check the difference between Raspberry PI OS Lite, Raspberry PI OS and Raspberry PI OS Full in my Raspberry PI OS Lite vs Desktop: Comparison Between the Distributions article.

If you are interested in trying Operating Systems different from the official Raspberry PI OS, the Raspberry PI Imager gives you many options.

Other Operating Systems

The “Other General-Purpose OS” folder shows you other Operating Systems, usually with Desktop environments, available for you and compatible with Raspberry PI computer boards. This list includes, for example, Ubuntu, Risck OS, and Alpine Linux.

By scrolling through the other options, you will discover that you can easily run:

• Media Player OS: to create a powerful media centre
• Emulation OS: for emulating ancient gaming consoles
• Specific Purpose OS: like Home Automation, remote learning hub, and 3-D printing software

I like the idea of having an OS ready for use (out of the box), which is a great help for people at their very first approach with Raspberry PI computers. But I prefer to install this software by myself on top of a Raspberry PI OS Lite, as this allows me to have more services running from a single Raspberry PI computer board, as you can find in my Raspberry PI Tutorials.

Useful Tools

At the end of this list, you will also find a few useful tools.

• The “Misc utility images” allows you to write special images for your Raspberry PI computer to change the bootloader options (by changing the media order where to check the boot files).
• The “Erase” option will make you sure that the micro SD card is completely erased (useful when an attempt to write an OS gives you failing results).
• The “Use Custom” option enables you to use a custom (raw) image file that you downloaded from the web and you want to flash for your Raspberry PI.

Select the Storage

Before proceeding to the next step, please plug in the micro-SD storage in your remote computer. By clicking the “CHOOSE STORAGE” button, you will see it listed in the following window:

You can just click on it to select it and move to the next step.

Customize Raspberry PI OS Settings

Once you have selected the Storage where to flash the OS, you will see the following screen, with the option buttons populated with your selections:

If you selected one of the Raspberry PI OS options, when you click the “NEXT” button, you will be prompted to choose if you want to apply, edit, or clear the current OS customisation options:

The OS customisation options allow you to prepare the Raspberry PI OS with some settings pre-configured from the first boot. This is a great help to get your OS ready to use, and to avoid performing some annoying tasks common to any OS installation from scratch (like giving it the first user, setting up the WiFi network, changing the keyboard layout, and so on).

By clicking the “EDIT SETTINGS” button, you will get a new window where you can change them.

General Settings

At the beginning, you will see the “General” tab (you can select the different tabs at the top of the window). Here you can pre-configure the hostname for your Raspberry PI (optional), the username and password (suggested), the WiFi to use for internet connection (suggested):

Scrolling down, you can also select the timezone and the keyboard layout (both suggested).

Service Settings

Moving to the Services tab, you can enable by default the remote SSH service. This is really useful if you want to perform an “headless installation”, where you will not attach a monitor or a keyboard to your Raspberry PI and you will manage it completely from a remote computer. In this case, I suggest using this option:

Other Options

In the final “Options” tab, you can select some optional additional settings which won’t change important things on the installation for the average Raspberry PI user:

After this step, please click “SAVE” to save your current OS customisation and click “YES” to the previous prompt about applying the current OS customisation settings.

Final Raspberry PI Imager Operations

Before proceeding to flash the OS image on the storage, the Raspberry PI Imager will warn you that all the data currently saved in the storage will be erased.

At this point, you can still abort the installation if you need to save files from the storage card. Otherwise, please click YES to proceed with the OS installation.

The software will start downloading the required OS image (if not available in cache) and write it to the storage:

After the write process ends, it will also perform a verification to check if the image has been written correctly:

At the end, a message will give you the process result:

After this, your SD card is ready to be used. You can now remove it from the remote computer (according to the unmounting/eject procedure of the OS of your remote computer) and use it with your Raspberry PI.

What If Raspberry PI Imager Ends With an Error?

If the image flashing process ended with a fail warning, you can do some checks.

In my experience, the first attempt is to run the Raspberry PI Imager with Administration / elevated privileges. This can fix some hidden errors when the software can’t fully access the storage resources.

Another attempt is simply to retry the writing process.

Moreover, you can fully erase the storage with the erase tool (from the CHOOSE OS options) before writing the image, as shown in the previous steps.

The last attempt is to change the storage with a different one from a different producer: some (very cheap) micro-SD cards could not be suitable for installing an OS image (a very rare case). It’s a really rare case, but it’s a possible case.

What’s next

If you are interested in more Raspberry PI projects (both with Lite and Desktop OS), take a look at my Raspberry PI Tutorials.

Enjoy!