import input_data MNIST tensorflow not working

Question

TensorFlow MNIST example not running with fully_connected_feed.py

I checked this out and realized that input_data was not built-in. So I downloaded the whole folder from here. How can I start the tutorial:

import input_data
mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("MNIST_data/", one_hot=True)


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-6-a5af65173c89> in <module>()
----> 1 import input_data
      2 mnist = tf.input_data.read_data_sets("MNIST_data/", one_hot=True)

ImportError: No module named input_data

I'm using iPython (Jupyter) so do I need to change my working directory to this folder I downloaded? or can I add this to my tensorflow directory? If so, where do I add the files? I installed tensorflow with pip (on my OSX) and the current location is ~/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tensorflow/__init__.py

Are these files meant to be accessed directly through tensorflow like sklearn datasets? or am I just supposed to cd into the directory and work from there? The example is not clear.

EDIT:

This post is very out-dated

Answer 1

So let's assume that you are in the directory: /somePath/tensorflow/tutorial (and this is your working directory).

All you need to do is to download the input_data.py file and place it like this. Let's assume that the file name you invoke:

import input_data
mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("MNIST_data/", one_hot=True)
...

is main.py and it is also in the same directory.

Once this is done, you can just start running main.py which will start downloading the files and will put them in the MNIST_data folder (once they are there the script will not be downloading them next time).