Plug-ins

GIMP 0.54 shipped with a plug-in system at its core, and people wrote their own filters to fill the gaps and have fun. Every plug-in listed below comes bundled with this build — there's nothing to build. All these third-party plug-ins are disabled by default. Click Enable to see how to enable one.

Want a plug-in that isn't (yet) bundled here? Any other 0.54 plug-in — one you found online or wrote yourself — can be compiled and installed by hand.

GIMP 0.54 plug-ins are plain C programs that link against libgimp, so you can compile and install your own or any third-party one you find online. Here's the whole flow.

1. Find a plug-in (or write one)

The first GIMP Plug-In Registry survives as a Wayback Machine snapshot. Browse the 0.54 category — not the futuristic, bleeding-edge 0.99! — and grab the .c file for any plug-in. To write one from scratch, gimp.h (exported in step 2) documents the full API or you look at existing plug-ins to figure out how things work.

2. Launch the app once first

On first run GIMP creates ~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/data/plug-ins/ (on the plug-in search path) and exports libgimp.a and gimp.h to ~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/data/dev/ so you can compile against them on the host.

3. Install development tools

You need GCC and the C standard library headers on the host:

sudo pacman -S gcc      # Arch Linux
sudo dnf install gcc    # Fedora

4. Compile the plug-in

Most plug-ins only need to link against libgimp.a and libc:

DEV=~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/data/dev
gcc -o my-plugin my-plugin.c -I"$DEV" "$DEV/libgimp.a" -lm
mv my-plugin ~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/data/plug-ins/

5. Register it in gimprc

Edit ~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/config/gimprc and add a plug-in line (or file-plug-in for a file-format handler), following the same format as the existing entries:

plug-in my-plugin "Effects/My Plug-In"

The quoted path is slash-delimited: Effects is the submenu and My Plug-In the menu entry. Restart GIMP and your plug-in appears under the path you registered.