How to Write an .img to SD Card on Mac the Easy Way with Etcher

How to Write an .img to SD Card on Mac the Easy Way with Etcher

If you need to burn an .img image file to an SD card from a Mac, you may have discovered that there isnt a particularly obvious way to do so with a default GUI app like Disk Utility. Not to worry though, an excellent free third party solution exists called Etcher, which makes burning image files to an SD card remarkably simple. Writing images to SD cards is probably going to be most useful for Mac users who are setting up a RaspberryPi or another lightweight linux distribution, but there are certainly many other reasons to flash an SD card with an image as well. Were obviously focusing on writing .img files to an SD card here, but you can use Etcher to burn a variety other image file formats, including .img, .iso, .dmg, .zip, .dsk, .etch, .bin, .bz2, .gz, .hddimg, .raw, .rpi-sdimg, sdcard, and xz. And yes, the flashed SD card will be bootable if the starting image is intended to be, like for a RaspberryPi. You can write an .img file (or other disk image) to an SD card with Etcher in a few simple steps: It can take a while to write an image to an SD card, depending on the card speed as well as the size of the disk image. In my testing when writing a 30 GB RetroPie .img disk image file to a 32 GB SD card for use with a , the entire process of writing the image and then validating the SD card took about 1.5 hours, but your mileage may vary. When finished, the Etcher app will report that flashing has been completed. Thats it, youre done. Pull out the SD card and its ready to boot and use used for whatever your project is. Super easy, right? IMPORTANT: Etcher defaults to automatically unmounting the drive or SD card after the image been successfully burned and written to the target volume, so keep that in mind if you go looking around in the Finder or elsewhere for a mounted image, it wont be there. And yes, you can turn that off in Etcher app settings if need be. By the way, Etcher is available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, so if youre needing to write an SD card from a different operating system, you should be covered as the instructions for using the app are identical regardless of the OS in use. If youre opposed to using something like Etcher for whatever reason, you can via the command line, but its certainly more complicated than using an easy GUI app. But, to each their own. If you enjoyed this youll probably appreciate our too.