20 Best Free GIMP Plugins

Since we recently covered the best Photoshop plugins, it’s only fair that we round up the best plugins for GIMP, too. After all, GIMP is the most popular image editing application for Linux and the biggest open source competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Despite some differences in appearance and functionality of the two, GIMP is often recommended to Linux newcomers as “the Photoshop alternative“. Many popular Linux distributions offer GIMP as a pre-installed application, but if you feel that the basic version lacks some features, it’s easy to add more thanks to GIMP plugins and scripts.

GIMP plugins are usually written either in Python or as Script-Fu extensions. Some plugins can be installed from the repositories, some have to be compiled, but most are really easy to install: you just copy the plugin (with .py extension) or script file (.scm file) into your /home/$USERNAME/.gimp/plug-ins or /home/$USERNAME/.gimp/scripts folder, respectively, and restart GIMP.

Note that you need to install Python support for GIMP (the gimp-python package; should be available in your distro’s repositories) if you want to use Python-based plugins.

As you can already tell, this article is focused on the Linux version of GIMP, but Windows users can also use all these plugins; the installation instructions can be found on plugins’ official websites. Of course, all GIMP plugins on this list are completely free to download, install and use.

1. Layer via Copy/Cut

gimp-plugins-layercopycut

This plugin introduces a function from Photoshop into GIMP, and it’s very practical if you’re a designer or if you often work with layers. It can copy, move and cut selected areas from one layer or a group of layers, and create new layers from selected areas. Once it’s installed, you can access this plugin from the “Layers” menu.

Download

2. BIMP – Batch Image Manipulation Plugin

gimp-plugins-bimp

BIMP is one of my favorite GIMP plugins – it’s incredibly practical and simple to use. It will save you time if you need to edit multiple images at once. You can resize, crop, rotate, rename and watermark as many images as you want, and changes can be previewed in the plugin dialog.

Download

3. Beautify

gimp-plugins-beautify

Beautify is a plugin that aggregates several photo effects and editing options into a single, straightforward interface, and turns your GIMP into a photo retouching studio. You can use it to give your photos a dash of glamour, correct color and contrast issues, and apply Instagram-like filters to your selfies.

Download

4. Contrast Fix

gimp-plugins-contrastfix

Badly lit photographs happen more often than we would like to admit. Whether your photo is too dark or too bright, Contrast Fix is a GIMP plugin that can save it. Experiment with the settings for the best result, and don’t forget that you can run the plugin more than once on the same image.

Download

5. Lensfun

gimp-plugins-lensfun

This useful plugin will help you fix lens distortion on your images. It detects the type of your camera and the lens you used by reading the EXIF data, but you can change these settings in the plugin dialog. After you’ve installed the plugin, you can find it in the Filters – Enhance menu.

Download

6. Refocus

gimp-plugins-refocus

Sometimes photos turn out blurry and out of focus. Maybe you’ve taken them in a hurry, or your hands were really shaky. Doesn’t matter, because Refocus will try to fix them with a special method called FIR Wiener filtering. You can adjust the parameters in the plugin dialog and preview what the final image will look like.

Download

7. Stitch Panorama

gimp-plugins-stitchpanorama

There are great standalone Linux tools for making panoramic images, but if you want to do that directly in GIMP, this plugin is your best bet. You can stitch together multiple images, and perform blending, distortion matching and color correction if necessary.

Download

8. UFRaw

gimp-plugins-ufraw

UFRaw is a great GIMP plugin for professional photographers. It provides support for editing RAW images in GIMP, and you can use it to control exposure, color balance and temperature, and perform various image corrections. The plugin also has a batch workflow mode in which you can edit many photos at once.

Download

9. Liquid Rescale

gimp-plugins-liquidrescale

Liquid Rescale is a powerful plugin for GIMP that lets you resize any image without distortion, as well as remove selected parts of the image. If you’re familiar with Photoshop’s Content-Aware Scaling feature, you’ll understand what this plugin is for. There’s a helpful preview window within the plugin dialog which you can use to interactively tweak the parameters. When installed successfully, Liquid Rescale can be found in the “Layers” menu.

Download

10. Separate+

gimp-plugins-separate

Separate+ is a simple but essential GIMP plugin, especially for designers. It lets you convert between different colorspaces (RGB, CMYK…), set the ICC profile of your monitor and perform some color-related adjustments on images.

Download

11. G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing)

gimp-plugins-gmic

G’MIC is probably the most popular GIMP plugin – and rightfully so. It’s an image processing framework that contains hundreds of presets, filters and effects you can apply to your images. You can access them in the “Filters” menu, and if you’d like to test G’MIC before installation, there’s a completely usable online version that runs in your browser. How cool is that?

Download

12. Resynthesizer

gimp-plugins-resynthesizer

Resynthesizer is an exceptional plugin that every serious GIMP user should install. With this plugin, you can remove objects from photos, repeat textures for better tiling or seamless image healing, and transfer textures from one image to another. Have you heard of Content Aware Fill in Photoshop? Well, Resynthesizer is used for the same purpose, and apparently GIMP had it long before Photoshop.

Download

13. Save for Web

gimp-plugins-saveforweb

This plugin is an absolute must for web designers, bloggers and anyone who needs to prepare visual materials for the Web. I use it every day, and honestly, I don’t know what I would do without it. Save for Web lets you compress, scale, smooth and crop images before uploading them, ensuring that they are not too big for your website. You can find it in GIMP’s “File” menu.

Download

14. Wavelet Denoise

gimp-plugins-wavelet

This valuable plugin will help you reduce noise in your photos caused by low light or incorrect camera settings. You can tweak the parameters and preview changes in the plugin dialog.

Download

15. Watermark

gimp-plugins-watermark

Sadly, content theft happens very often on the Internet, and it’s virtually unstoppable. However, there are ways in which you can at least try to protect your digital art, and watermarks are one of them. This simple plugin lets you add watermark text to your images, with some basic adjustments like fonts, size and position of the watermark. Find it in the Script-Fu – MyScripts menu.

Download

16. Elsamuko’s Filters

gimp-plugins-elsamuko

This valuable collection of photo filters is something you can’t work without if you’re a professional photographer, and even average GIMP users will be delighted by its versatility. Included is the famous “National Geographic” photo effect that will give your photos a classy touch. You can download and install all scripts at once, or just choose the ones you like from the plugin website.

Download

17. FX Foundry

gimp-plugins-fxfoundry

Another massive collection of effects and scripts to manipulate your photos, FX Foundry will create its own menu in GIMP from which you can access all its features. Every effect has its own dialog where you can fine-tune the settings before modifying your images.

Download

18. Script-Fu Bundle & GIMPressionist

gimp-plugins-gimpressionist

Here are some more scripts and effects for you to try out. Script-Fu Bundle gathers a bunch of different effects which you can use to turn your photos into paintings, make them sharper, add frames, modify saturation and much, much more. The GIMPressionist is a plugin that comes with its own presets and filters, but some scripts from the Script-Fu Bundle can be imported and controlled from it.

Download

19. Palette Generator

gimp-plugins-palettegenerator

This plugin is yet another must-have for designers, since it lets you easily generate color palettes with the help of adjustable criteria. Of course, you could use free, online tools for this, but if you prefer keeping your workflow simple, you’ll appreciate the ability to do it directly in GIMP.

Download

20. Filter Pack

gimp-plugins-filterpack

Filter Pack is a plugin that comes with GIMP by default, proving once again how awesome GIMP is. You can access it from the “Colors” menu, and it lets you adjust color settings for the entire image or just the selected part. Checking the boxes under “Windows” opens separate windows with variations of your image, and here you can click on each variation to apply (and intensify) its effect on the image.

Download

If you want all these plugins, but don’t feel like installing them one by one, here’s a pro-tip: Debian, Ubuntu and Arch users can install the gimp-plugin-registry package from their repositories. The package contains almost all GIMP plugins from this list, including Liquid Rescale, Save for Web and the mighty FX Foundry.

Are you a GIMP user? Can you recommend some other great plugins for GIMP? Let us know in the comments.

comment Comments 28
  • Kaylee says:

    This would be more helpful if the links worked. most go to 404 pages.

  • Gustavo J. Mata says:

    Very useful post Ivana, thanks a lot!

  • Tilak Banerjee. says:

    Can I use these with GIMP 2.10.6???????

    • jason says:

      Try it and let us know.

  • cosmo says:

    thank you for this bu tplease can someone make a utube video showing how to install plugins into gimp with ubuntu systems thanks

  • Mackenzie says:

    The Filter Pack download link is wrong.

  • Mackenzie says:

    The Filter Pack download link is wrong

  • Christopher Fardan Williams says:

    Great article, these plugins will help a lot.

  • Mike Shields II says:

    It would seem that there’s no link for the Gimpressionist Bundle available. What gives?

    • Jonathan says:

      It seems to be a default in GIMP (it is in my installation) as part of the Script-Fu bundle. Look for it under >Filters >Artistic >

  • Bukunolami says:

    Thank you Ivana.

  • Robin Soon says:

    sorry i need to amend my comment below. what I mean is the Refine Edge tool from Photoshop and not Free Range tool.

  • ed says:

    Very Nice of you to put these together. thank you.

  • Joanna Perona says:

    You’re so awesome! I don’t believe I have read through something like that before. So good to discover somebody with some genuine thoughts on this subject. Really.. thank you for starting this up. This website is one thing that is required on the web, someone with some originality!

  • Vikas says:

    Ivana, Thanks a lot for sharing this. Really helpful!

  • Mike Jaden says:

    Cool stuff.

    FX Foundry are one of the plugins I love. Everyday use. Perfect.

    Are there some more plugins available?

  • s 321 says:

    thank you

  • Terence Tseng says:

    Please may I know where do I SAVE the downloaded plugins – within the same GIMP folder/drive OR another different location/separate folder. (Sorry, I am newbie to the program)

    I am looking for features:
    1. Remove and erase unwanted images
    2. Add/create images to the original photos
    3. Blending 2 or several images into ONE new image.
    I will be grateful for any advice and assistance rendered. Thank you

    Terence Tseng
    Singapore
    asociano@hotmail.com

  • Moltres Rider says:

    The GitHub links are fake! DO NOT use GitHub to link to files, they are fake programs and such. NO EXEs and NONE of the files EVER included in the downloads are native to ANY programs they claim to be. As if Google isn’t being stupid enough on giving me a legitimate page for Resynthesizer

    • DarkBorn says:

      Stupid, aren’t you? “Fake programs?” 😀 “NO EXEs” is because GitHub is repository for sources (of exe/binaries).
      However, you could find EXEcutable binaries – if author put it there.
      Just READ “readme”, download zip (“Clone or download”) or whatever is needed.
      But, for Gimp, you don’t even need that – just extract/copy proper plugin in Gimp’s plugin folder.
      As for Linux (Ubuntu,Mint…), you just type or c&p “GIMP Plugin Registry” at your OS software manager and click “Install”: Resynthesizer and much more of it is right there.
      You’re stucked with Windows, and it hurts brain imho.
      Assuming that clicking on EXE is only valid option (because source is “fake”)… well it is the best way to pick up viruses.

      • Me says:

        There has got have been a nicer way to explain that..

      • Me says:

        *got to

  • Dmase says:

    Most of these plugins are a few, if not several, years old & not compatible w/ gimp 2.8.18. Lensfun draws error @ load time & has to be removed. Other will not load. I used some of these plugins back in 2.6 & worked fine but times have changed since then as the newer functionality in Gimp replaced several of these plugins. UFRaw is not a plugin for Gimp it’s standalone & has been for a few years.
    Not even the best plugins for 2016.

  • Joe says:

    Thanks for this nice overview 😉
    In Gimp 2.9 is Resynthesizer renamed in Heal selection. Resynthesizer is now another matter.

  • JC says:

    Lensfun fails load in Windows 10.

  • bdthree says:

    Great. Would like it if someone put together a one install via term for all these packages.

  • FransR says:

    Often I have a lot of prints (10x15cm). Its handsome to have an overview of all prints. For that reason I use the plug-in “Indexprint”.
    It gives pieces of paper with (in my case) 30 thumbnails and indexfiles with jpg extension.

    The plug-in can be found in the Gimp registry as indexprint: http://registry.gimp.org/node/24503
    Only problem is: all characters have to be in lower-case, also the extensions but with rename ‘y/A-Z/a-z/’ in the terminal window this is quickly solved.

  • ed says:

    thank you for this!!!!!

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