Fix error loading shared libraries: libpng16.so.16: cannot open shared object file

You can easily install libpng by building from source on a Linux system. I’ll be performing the installation to fix “error loading shared libraries: libpng16.so.16: cannot open shared object file” on a CentOS 7 system. But first we’ll need to install build tools.

# CentOS / Amazon Linux / Oracle Linux
sudo yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Confirm make and gcc tools are installed.

$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 7.3.1 20180712 (Red Hat 7.3.1-12)
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

$ make --version
GNU Make 3.82
Built for x86_64-koji-linux-gnu
Copyright (C) 2010  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Then download the latest release of libpng from sourceforge.

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/libpng/files/libpng16/1.6.37/libpng-1.6.37.tar.gz

Extract the file once downloaded:

tar xvf libpng-1.6.37.tar.gz

Run the configure command inside the directory created after file extraction.

cd libpng-1.6.37/
./configure

Run make command after success in the previous command execution.

make

Finally install libpng library in your Linux system.

$ sudo make install

Here is my successful installation message.

....
make  install-data-hook
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/ec2-user/libpng-1.6.37'
+ cd /usr/local/include
+ for f in pnglibconf.h png.h pngconf.h
+ rm -f pnglibconf.h
+ ln -s libpng16/pnglibconf.h pnglibconf.h
+ for f in pnglibconf.h png.h pngconf.h
+ rm -f png.h
+ ln -s libpng16/png.h png.h
+ for f in pnglibconf.h png.h pngconf.h
+ rm -f pngconf.h
+ ln -s libpng16/pngconf.h pngconf.h
+ cd /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
+ rm -f libpng.pc
+ ln -s libpng16.pc libpng.pc
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/ec2-user/libpng-1.6.37'
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/ec2-user/libpng-1.6.37'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ec2-user/libpng-1.6.37'

After installation you should be able to locate libpng16.so.16 file.

$ sudo find / -name libpng16.so.16
/usr/local/lib/libpng16.so.16
/home/ec2-user/libpng-1.6.37/.libs/libpng16.so.16

You can then continue to build the application that depends on libpng library.