ImageScience on Windows without the pain

Back in December I posted about ImageScience and RubyInline on Windows. Turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to get this combination working: according to Google Analytics it has become our second most popular blog entry (for the naturally curious this is the most popular).

A man who knows a lot about Ruby on Windows is Luis Lavena and a day after I posted he very kindly took the time to compile a Windows version of the ImageScience gem and instantly transformed 30 minutes of hard work into about 30 seconds of simplicity!

If you really like doing things the hard way then feel free to read my original post and try compiling everything for yourself, but if all you really want is to get up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible then here are the new ‘easy’ instructions (note: I’m assuming that you have Ruby installed and working in C:\Program Files\Ruby):

Install RubyInline

Open a command prompt window and run:
```
gem install --include-dependencies RubyInline
```
At the time of writing this will install RubyInline version 3.6.6.
Download and install FreeImage

Download the FreeImage binary (at the time of writing version 3.10.0) and unzip to your desktop. Copy FreeImage.dll from the dist directory to C:\Windows\system32.
Download and install the Win32 ImageScience gem

Download the Win32 ImageScience gem (at the time of writing version 1.1.3) and copy it to C:\Program Files\Ruby.

Install the gem from a command prompt window using:
```
gem install "C:\Program Files\Ruby\image_science-1.1.3-i386-mswin32.gem"
```
You can then delete the gem file from C:\Program Files\Ruby.
Test ImageScience

Open a command prompt window, type irb to start a Ruby console and type:
```
require 'rubygems'
require 'image_science'
```
After the second require You should see => true as the result: if you get an error then check that you copied the FreeImage DLL to the correct location in step 3.

And that’s it you’re done!

33 comments

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Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Pedro

February 23rd, 2008 @ 13:27 – permalink

Insanely useful! Thank you very much!

There's always 'that' time when the only thing you have is a windows station, and when that time comes... this is an extremely helpful tutorial.

You should update the previous post (with the older method) and link to this one at the top. PageRank is much higher on the other one
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Richard

March 4th, 2008 @ 21:59 – permalink
Very helpful. Two minor edits:
1. gem install needs quotes, i.e. gem install "c:\Program Files\Ruby\image_science-1.1.3-i386-mswin32.gem"
2. test on irb only works if you've already done "require rubygems"
Thanks!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob

March 5th, 2008 @ 08:52 – permalink

Thanks Richard, I’ve updated the post. On my system I don’t need to explicitly require 'rubygems' because I used the one-click installer which sets the RUBYOPT environment variable.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rafael Mueller

March 7th, 2008 @ 15:16 – permalink

Works like a charm, thank you!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Abhik

April 1st, 2008 @ 06:26 – permalink

Worked perfectly. Thanks a lot!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Mike Costa

April 2nd, 2008 @ 10:59 – permalink

Thank u! Works perfect!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Max RB

May 15th, 2008 @ 01:26 – permalink

Thanks - exactly what I needed
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Maarten

May 20th, 2008 @ 13:44 – permalink

Thank you so much for writing this down, very helpful for a beginner.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Antony

May 22nd, 2008 @ 06:46 – permalink

Thank you so much for posting this, it took me hours to try to figure out FreeImage until I found the posting. You are a god!!

Antony
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by rdogg

June 7th, 2008 @ 00:43 – permalink

Thank you !!! , i installed image_science gem using the gem utility, and i was having problems, after i downloaded the one of your article everything is working :)
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Jason Black

July 7th, 2008 @ 22:40 – permalink

Bless you, bless you, god bless you, sir!

After pounding my head against rmagick for a long time (damn thing just refuses to work with rails for me), I said "screw it, I'll switch to Image Science" Your simple, clear 30 second instructions did the job and now attachment_fu us happy.

You rock.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Barry

August 4th, 2008 @ 14:14 – permalink

thank you so much ... was just about to give up after almost 2 days trying to get this bloody thing to work!!!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by milton

August 6th, 2008 @ 10:02 – permalink

You are blessed so much. Thank you. Perfect for beginner!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Manjula

August 13th, 2008 @ 10:08 – permalink

Hi,

This is a wonderful article. I have followed the ways to install. But i'm getting error. Don't know where i'm going wrong. According to the 3rd step i've my ruby folder in the path D:\installation\ruby. So i've copied the gem to this folder and installed. Installation was successful. But when i run or when i test through irb require "image_science" it throwing error.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob Anderton

August 15th, 2008 @ 09:53 – permalink

What is the error?

Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Sunil

August 24th, 2008 @ 01:17 – permalink

Thanks for these easy instruction, but I hit a road block. I get this error when I do require 'image_science'. Any idea what I am screwing up? the only diffrence I can see is versions. I am rubyinline version 3.7.0 and Imagesceince 3.11.0. Thanks for any help.

Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - cl -nologo -LD   -MD -Zi -O2b2xg- -G6 -I C:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mswin32  -I C:/ruby/include -LC:/ruby/lib -o "C:\\Documents and Settings\\sunil/.ruby_inline/Inline_ImageScience_aa58.so" "C:/Docu
ments and Settings/sunil/.ruby_inline/Inline_ImageScience_aa58.c" -lfreeimage -lstdc++  -link /LIBPATH:"C:/ruby/lib" /DEFAULTLIB:"msvcrt-ruby18.lib" /INCREMENTAL:no /EXPORT:Init_Inline_ImageScience_aa58
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.7.0/lib/inline.rb:444:in ``'
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.7.0/lib/inline.rb:444:in `build'
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.7.0/lib/inline.rb:654:in `inline'
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/image_science-1.1.3/lib/image_science.rb:84
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `gem_original_require'
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `require'
        from (irb):1

Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Sunil

August 24th, 2008 @ 04:39 – permalink

Looks like the problem is I don't have cl. But I am not sure why it is trying to compile anything. I have the FreeImage.dll in windows/system32.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob Anderton

August 24th, 2008 @ 17:30 – permalink

It looks like maybe you're not using the Win32 version of the ImageScience gem. On my system it installed itself into the lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\image_science-1.1.3-x86-mswin32 folder of my Ruby installation, and it contains a file called Inline_ImageScience_aa58.so in the lib\inline folder of the gem (this is the precompiled bit that means you don't need cl).

It might be worth uninstalling all versions of the gem using gem uninstall and then re-downloading the pre-compiled gem and install as per step 3 of my instructions.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Sunil

August 25th, 2008 @ 08:15 – permalink

Yeah, looks like I also had a non windows version of the gem. Uninstalling and reinstalling the gem fixed it. Thanks.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by iioiooioo

November 7th, 2008 @ 04:32 – permalink

Thanks!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by asbrown

January 7th, 2009 @ 22:06 – permalink

live saver!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by John Clancy

January 26th, 2009 @ 22:44 – permalink

Tips: Don't get too smart people --

Type this exactly -- gem install "C:\Program Files\Ruby\image_science-1.1.3-i386-mswin32.gem" (for example, don't get lazy and type "gem install image_science")

Also, I had to modify the above to be: gem install "C:\ruby\image_science-1.1.3-i386-mswin32.gem" because my ruby is in c:\ruby and not c:\Program Files\Ruby.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by iioiooioo

February 18th, 2009 @ 03:00 – permalink

For some reason (on Vista64) I had to copy FreeImage.dll to my ruby/bin folder. I believe that all of my environment variables are otherwise set up correctly. Thanks again for this awesome guide!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by RashOnRails

April 8th, 2009 @ 20:33 – permalink

Installed the windows gem and got as far as "require 'image_science'. This gave the error "Define INLINEDIR or HOME in your environment and try again LoadError: IO error -- image_science".

Okay, I'll bite. I set both of these environment variables to C:. Tried again. Got another error "C:\ is insecure (40777). It may not be group or world writable. Exiting. LoadError: IO error -- image_science".

Help!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob Anderton

April 10th, 2009 @ 12:08 – permalink
I don't have the INLINEDIR variable set on my PC, but I do have HOME set to my Windows profile folder (which I think is the 'normal' thing to set it to):
```
C:\>SET HOME
HOME=C:\Documents and Settings\Rob.MYPOOTA
```
I'm on XP, I think Vista stores this stuff in C:\Users. If changing the HOME variable doesn't help, what version of Windows, the image_science and RubyInline gems are you using?
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Darek Rusin

May 8th, 2009 @ 18:30 – permalink

thanks! that helped a lot.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Daria

June 4th, 2009 @ 16:12 – permalink

Thank you for the post sooo SOOOO much!!! I've spent about 2-3 days now trying to get attachament_fu working with ImageScience, and this is the best post on how to install the ImageScience.

Thanks a lot again.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by MichaellaS

July 21st, 2009 @ 11:00 – permalink

tks for the effort you put in here I appreciate it!
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by silent (e)

September 8th, 2009 @ 22:46 – permalink

Has anyone found a win32 gem for the recently released ImageScience 1.2.1 gem?
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob Anderton

September 11th, 2009 @ 17:15 – permalink

I haven't seen one yet (why can't they just bundle a binary like so many other gems do?!) - might be worth pinging Luis to see if he fancies compiling a new version... and it might also be worth checking out his work on the new Ruby installer for Windows.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Jae

September 30th, 2010 @ 08:11 – permalink

Rob, Thanks for this article. Have you had a chance to try installation for ruby 1.9.2? I have installed on 1.8.6 with this article, but now I am looking into upgrading to 1.9.2 for performance improvements.
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Rob Anderton

October 1st, 2010 @ 22:33 – permalink

Hi Jae,
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) since switching to a Mac I've not had to keep up to date with these things, so I haven't tried Win32 ImageScience and Ruby 1.9.2.

An easier way than custom compilation might be to get the latest RubyInstaller and install the DevKit which I hear is supposed to make native gem compilation on Windows a relatively easy process.
Rob
Comment on ImageScience on Windows without the pain by Jae

October 7th, 2010 @ 05:24 – permalink

Thanks for the reply, Rob! Migrating to Mac is something I am considering as well.

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About this entry

Author: Rob Anderton
Published: February 18th, 2008 @ 19:55
Updated: June 10th, 2008 @ 12:14
Tags: compiler, imagescience, rails development, ruby, rubyinline, win32, windows
Comments: 33 comments

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