How to Install GDAL Python Bindings Alongside osgeo4w for a separate Python version

Question

I am currently attempting to install the Christopher Gholke distrubution of GDAL (and associated bindings) on a work computer as a dependency for a package. This question is related, but I need to run the version of the Python bindings because it is a Python 3 module, so running through the osgeo4w shell is not sufficient.

I am running Windows 7 Enterprise.

When trying to import any variation on:

import gdal #or
from osgeo import gdal # or
import osr # or
import ogr # or
#etc

It produced the error

 ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

I successfully installed the Christopher Gholke distribution of GDAL on a separate machine with no errors. The machine that had a succesful install did not have osgeo4w installed, which leads me to believe it is the problem.

Is there any way to successfully import gdal from a Python 3.6 shell with osgeo4w without throwing the above error?

Answer 1

You can try to import library explicitly using below code which will add a folder of libraries to your python code and then you can Import the needed module (GDAL):

import sys 
sys.path 
sys.path.append("C:/ms4w/python/gdal") #Add this folder to python environment path
import gdal

Answer 2

It turns out that this particular machine did not have a Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio installed. After installing the distribution (specifically Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015) everything worked flawlessly with no further modifications.