Imagex (Wimlib)

Imagex (Wimlib)

Imagex (wimlib-imagex) is a free, open-source command-line tool used for creating, managing and applying Windows Imaging Format (WIM) files. It is the command-line frontend of the wimlib project, a cross-platform C library for creating, extracting, and modifying Windows Imaging Format (WIM) files, and it provides a free alternative to Microsoft's ImageX, DISM and WIMGAPI. Imagex can be used to capture, modify, and apply Windows operating system images.

Imagex (Wimlib) lets you capture, modify and apply Windows images (WIM files) without Microsoft's DISM or ImageX.

Features

Imagex has a wide range of features that make it an ideal tool for managing WIM files. The following is a list of the most important features:

1. Capturing Images: Imagex can capture a directory tree or an entire NTFS volume into a WIM image, keeping hard links, symbolic links, junctions, named data streams and security descriptors. Several images can be stored in one archive, and identical files are saved only once.

2. Modifying Images: Imagex can modify the contents of an existing WIM image with the wimupdate command, adding, deleting or renaming files and folders without capturing the image again. Images can also be exported to other archives, and on Linux they can be mounted read-write.

3. Applying Images: Imagex can apply (extract) a WIM image to a directory or an NTFS volume, restoring the files together with their metadata, or extract only selected files. This makes it useful for deploying Windows onto prepared partitions.

4. Compressing Images: Imagex supports XPRESS, LZX and LZMS compression, and its codecs usually compress better and faster than Microsoft's. It can also optimize an archive to remove wasted space and split a large WIM file into smaller parts, making the file easier to manage.

5. Windows PE and ESD Files: Imagex can modify the boot.wim images used by Windows PE and Windows setup media, which helps when building custom boot disks, and it supports the solid-compressed ESD files that Microsoft uses for Windows downloads.

Conclusion

Imagex is a powerful, open-source command-line tool used for creating, managing, and applying Windows Imaging Format (WIM) files. It supports capturing, modifying, applying, exporting, splitting and compressing WIM images, and it works on both Windows and UNIX-like systems. The Windows package contains wimlib-imagex.exe, the libwim DLL and shortcuts such as wimapply.cmd and wimcapture.cmd. Imagex is released under the GPLv3 (the library also under the LGPLv3), it is free to use and it is still actively maintained.