Raspberry Pi has released Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.11, a maintenance update to its popular utility for writing operating system images to SD cards and other storage devices.
One notable change is support for the rpi-preseed first-boot customization format, which is now also recognized as a valid init_format in the configuration schema. Additionally, accounts created through rpi-preseed are now always added to the sudo group, and cloud-init correctly writes sudo: null when users choose not to enable passwordless sudo.
Imager also verifies that customization files remain on the target device after the write operation completes. Regarding write reliability, the application now supports multi-frame .img.zst images by using Zstandard’s decompressed-size detection functionality.
On Linux and Windows, Imager now takes an exclusive lock when opening a drive. Windows handling has been refined so volume locks are held instead of just removing drive letters, and only removable mount points are detached.
Windows users benefit from fixes addressing device-size truncation and mismatched backup boot sectors, along with improved detection of UASP storage devices, now correctly classified as USB storage. Archive extraction performance has improved by combining smaller archive blocks into larger write operations.
On macOS, the release adjusts DiskArbitration handling by running it on the main run loop with blocking calls and moving nested run-loop operations onto worker threads.
Raspberry Pi Compute Module users get several Fastboot improvements as well. Imager now includes an Erase command for formatting devices and performs additional identity verification before treating a Fastboot target as a Raspberry Pi device.
Considerable work has gone into Raspberry Pi’s embedded network installer, whose Qt build is now configured for the minimal netboot environment, disabling OpenGL, DBus, ICU, and other unnecessary components.
Finally, the embedded build now also avoids QtDBus entirely, while features that depend on DBus, including portal file dialogs, the NetworkManager Wi-Fi backend, and the Raspberry Pi Connect URI handler, are compiled out when unavailable.
For additional details, see the changelog. You can download Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.11 now from the project’s GitHub releases page.
