Installation

Spinning Disk Analyzer is primarily a desktop application for the Windows platform. It is built with Python, but its Windows installer ships with a dedicated Python environment to isolate the application.

Other platforms, namely macOS and Linux, have not been rigorously tested, but the application is expected to work there as well. Users then have to provide the Python environment themselves.

On any platform, the package may also be installed as a Python library. Its image-processing routines can thus be used in scripts.

Prerequisites

The Python package has one external (i.e., non-Python) dependency that has to be installed manually: Vips, a library for fast, parallelized image processing.

• On Windows, download vips-dev-w64-web-8.14.5.zip (or a later version of that zip archive) and unpack it into C:\Program Files. Or install it in a location of your choice and either set the VIPS_DIR environment variable or add the folder that vips.exe is in to the search PATH.

• On macOS, it’s just brew install vips if you have Homebrew installed.

• On Debian-based Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, run apt install libvips.

Application

The application itself is distributed as a Windows installer, a .exe file. Find the download link in the “Assets” section under the latest of the releases in the project repository. (The actual file is hosted on the documentation web site, in the download folder, as it’s too large to be attached as an asset.)

Download the .exe installer file, double-click it, and follow the instructions. Typically, you would install it “for all users” into C:\Program Files.

Choosing install location in Windows installer.

Alternatively, and exclusively on other platforms, you may also install the application just like the library, see below. Both are part of the same pip-installable Python package. Just note that this won’t register the application with the operating system, i.e., it can then not be launched in the standard way such as via the Start menu on Windows. Instead, open a terminal and enter spinningdiskanalyzer.

Library

To only install the Python package in a Python environment you manage yourself, download the installer “wheel” (a .whl file) of the latest version from the repository’s Package Registry, then pip install that file. For example:

❯ pip install spinningdiskanalyzer-1.x.y-py3-none-any.whl

This will install the package, including the GUI application, and all its Python dependencies in your Python environment. You will then be able to do from spinningdiskanalyzer import imaging in your Python scripts to use the image-processing routines. Refer to the API reference for details.

A known limitation is that, on Windows, this will not work with the Python distribution installed from the Microsoft Store. Instead, use the official installers from python.org.