IMOD Download Page

IMOD is free. We do however request a few things from you to help with the IMOD development.
  1. Register with us and help us continue work on this project. The information you give will only be used to help us continue to get funding.
  2. Join the IMOD mailing list to get notifications about new releases and trainings. This list also helps us keep track of the interest in IMOD.
  3. Report bugs so we can fix them and give us feedback on your experiences with IMOD so future versions will contain the features you need.
  4. If you publish work using IMOD, please reference us. The citation is: Kremer J.R., D.N. Mastronarde and J.R. McIntosh (1996) Computer visualization of three-dimensional image data using IMOD. J. Struct. Biol. 116:71-76. For tomographic reconstruction, see also: Mastronarde, D. N. (1997) Dual-axis tomography: an approach with alignment methods that preserve resolution. J. Struct. Biol. 120:343-352.

Latest Stable Release Packages for:   Linux   -   Mac   -   Windows
Installing on Ubuntu and Debian Linux
IMOD and SELinux
Java for Running eTomo
Cygwin and Emacs for Using IMOD under Windows
Installation Notes
Extra Packages
Development Versions of IMOD (IMOD 4.4.x)
Package Archive - Older Versions of IMOD
Compatibility Libraries for Fedora Core 4 Onward


Latest Stable Release Packages - Linux

If you have a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, or recent Fedora Core, 32-bit versions of IMOD will not work and you must use a 64-bit version.

To use a GPU for computing, see IMOD Guide for more details about which packages work with which NVIDIA driver versions and operating system versions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for 64-bit systems (built under RHEL6, should work for Fedora Core 12 onward, and other current Linux versions). This package is built with CUDA 4.1.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for 64-bit systems (built under RHEL5, should work for Fedora Core 6 onward, Suse 10.3, and other somewhat older Linux versions). This package is built with CUDA 3.1.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for old 64-bit systems (use for Red Hat 4 and Suse 10).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for 32-bit systems (built under RHEL5, should work for Fedora Core 6 onward and Suse 10.3).

Fedora Core 2 32-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.3 for old 32-bit systems (built under Fedora Core 2, use for Red Hat 3 and 4, Suse 9 and 10). This older package has known bugs; use it only if you must.

Latest Stable Release Packages - Mac

To find out what version you need, click on About This Mac under the Apple menu.

The file that you download cannot be clicked on to install it; see the IMOD Guide for instructions on running it at the command line.

Mac OS X - Intel 64-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.7 on 64-bit Intel processors. This package was built on 10.6 with CUDA version 3 and supports computing with the GPU on 10.5 or 10.6.

Mac OS X 10.6 - 10.7 - 64-bit with CUDA 4: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for Mac OS X 10.6 - 10.7 built with CUDA version 4. This package is needed for computing with the GPU under 10.7 or with a Quadro 4000 card.

Mac OS X 10.5-10.6 - Intel 32-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.6 on Intel processors. This package also supports computing with the GPU and was built on 10.5.

Mac OS X - PPC 64-bit Download IMOD 4.5.7 for Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.6 on G5 processors.

Mac OS X - PPC 32-bit: Download IMOD 4.5.7 for Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.6 on PowerPC processors (G4, G5, etc).

Latest Stable Release Packages - Windows

These packages work on all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 through Windows 7.

Windows 64-bit: Download clickable installer, command-line self-installing file, or compressed tar file of IMOD 4.5.7 for 64-bit Windows versions (will not work with 32-bit Windows). These packages are built with CUDA 3.0.

Windows 64-bit with CUDA 2.1: Download clickable installer, command-line self-installing file, or compressed tar file of IMOD 4.5.7 for 64-bit Windows versions, built with CUDA 2.1. Use these packages if you want to use the GPU and cannot upgrade your NVIDIA drivers to the required level to use a package built with CUDA version 3.

Windows 64-bit with CUDA 4.1: Download clickable installer, command-line self-installing file, or compressed tar file of IMOD 4.5.7 for 64-bit Windows versions, built with CUDA 4.1, which is needed for the newest NVIDIA cards.

Windows 32-bit: Download clickable installer, command-line self-installing file, or compressed tar file of IMOD 4.5.7 for Microsoft Windows. These packages are built with CUDA 3.0.

Installing on Ubuntu and Debian Linux

A few steps are different when installing on Ubuntu, and these are described at various places in the installation instructions in the IMOD Guide. In essence:

IMOD and SELinux

If SELinux is enabled, the IMOD installation script will attempt to change the security context of the IMOD libraries if appropriate. If problems still occur with SELinux, please report them. The sign of trouble with SELinux is a message "cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied" when trying to run an IMOD program. To disable SELinux, change /etc/selinux/config so that it says SELINUX=disabled.

Java for Running eTomo

You must have a Java run-time environment (JRE) installed to run the eTomo interface for building tomograms. See the IMOD Guide for details about whether the Java available in your version of Linux will work with eTomo. Java 1.5 or later is required for IMOD 4.3. For your convenience, here are some versions of Java for:

Cygwin and Emacs for Using IMOD under Windows

For complete IMOD functionality under Windows, you need to install the Cygwin toolkit. To simplify this process, we provide both a Cygwin installer for the easiest possible initial installation, and also a package that you can install from (these two packages are from March 2010). You can also use the latter package to upgrade from an earlier package that we provided. When you upgrade, you may see an alarming warning about mount point changes; this is not relevant for typical usage of Cygwin.

IMOD 4.5 should work reliably with the current version available from Cygwin, even on 64-bit systems. However, the Python executable in current versions is not named python.exe, which is problematic. If you reinstall IMOD after upgrading Cygwin, the IMOD installer will take care of this; otherwise, see the IMOD guide.

To satisfy the terms of the Cygwin open source license, we also provide the source code matching the binaries in our package.

If you want to run emacs under Windows, you can get a Cygwin version, or use this package for Windows emacs 21.3.

Installation Notes

The download packages ending in .csh have been archived with tar, compressed with gzip, and packed with a C shell script that will install or upgrade IMOD in the recommended location. They must be run as scripts at the command line and cannot be installed by clicking on them. The Windows installer packages ending in .exe can be run by clicking on them. For instructions on unpacking, installing and setting up the IMOD environment, see the IMOD User's guide.

All packages for Linux now contain a copy of the Qt library that will be used when running IMOD. It is not placed on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH so it will not interfere with the use of the Qt library on the system or in other packages.


Extra Packages - Image Data, Documentation, and Standalone 3dmod for Windows


Development Versions of IMOD

Our ftp site contains development versions of IMOD that we have released to our local users. See the README file or the list of changes for details. To download a file, right click on it and then select "Save Link as..." or "Save Target as...". Double-clicking will load it into your browser.

Click here for the beta versions, which have generally been running for at least a few days. The alpha subdirectory has the packages when they are first released.

We also make our nightly builds from the current source available. There will often be bugs in these packages, so generally you should not use one unless you have been told to try it. Here they are.


Package Archive

Older versions of IMOD, 3.xx and 4.xx

Compatibility Libraries for Fedora Core 4 and Above

Some compatibility libraries may be needed for IMOD 3.xx under Linux. They are needed if you do a fresh install of Fedora Core 4 onward rather than an upgrade from a version before FC4. To run the FC4 or RHEL5 build of IMOD, you need compat-libf2c. The easiest way to get this is with:
    yum install 'compat-libf2c-*'
If this does not work, here is a 32-bit rpm and 64-bit rpm for FC7, and a 32-bit rpm and 64-bit rpm for FC8.
An alternative is to install IMOD with the -libg2c option.
To run the FC2 build of IMOD, you also need compat-libstdc++-33, which can be installed with:
    yum install compat-libstdc++-33

Last comprehensive update, May 8, 2012.