GIMP/Installing Plugins
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Plugins can be very helpful in The GIMP. GIMP Plugins can be quite useful. Take, for example, the DDS plugin. The DDS plugin is a now stable and reliable plugin to load DDS files, supporting the OpenGL S3TC extension. Of course, GIMP plugins are not limited to file loading. There exists a GIMP plugin for using the CMYK color model!
If you want to run Photoshop plugins in The GIMP, Microsoft Windows and Linux users may use the PSPI plugin. http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/pspi.html
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[edit] Finding and downloading plugins
The largest known source of GIMP plugins is the GIMP Plug-In Registry. The GIMP Plug-In Registry contains many useful plugins for The GIMP and all of its versions. In addition to regular plugins, you can also find Perl, Script-Fu and Python plugins at the GIMP Plug-In Registry.
You can find the GIMP Plug-In registry at the URL below.
Once you have downloaded the plugin, you need to load it into the GIMP. In order to load it into the GIMP, it needs to be extracted from the package in which it came from.
[edit] Extracting plugin packages
Almost every plugin you download will come in a package. You need to extract this package.
ZIP files can be extracted easily in Windows and GNU/Linux with the utilities included with your OS. Windows includes ZIP support by default. Most (if not all) GNU/Linux distributions include Info-ZIP, which can be used to decompress ZIP files, along with a GUI frontend, such as File Roller for GNOME and Ark for KDE.
RAR files are compressed using a proprietary format. WinRAR is the original tool for RAR, available for many platforms, but it is proprietary shareware. There are alternatives. The free software (as in freedom) unrar can unpack RAR files that do not use RAR 3.0 or later. If RAR 3.0 is needed, taking a newer CVS snapshot may work, which has been done for the unrar-free Debian and Ubuntu packages. The 7-Zip program includes support for RAR 3.0, but the RAR component is proprietary.
TAR.GZ and TAR.BZ2 files are compressed archives originating from GNU/Linux. It is a double extension. The "GZ" or "BZ2" section refers to the fact the compression method is gzip or bzip2. gzip and bzip2 can only compress single files, however, so a program like tar is used to merge the files/folders into one file, hence the "TAR" section of the name. On GNU/Linux, the original tools can be used, usually "tar -xvzf file.tar.gz" (TAR.GZ) or "tar -xvjf file.tar.bz2" (TAR.BZ2). On Windows, the free 7-Zip can be used.
7z files can be done in Windows with 7-Zip, and in GNU/Linux, if the p7zip utility is installed, Ark and File Roller will work, along with the p7zip command directly.
If you find any other file types, a quick search on the internet will help. On the Windows platform, 7-Zip is a piece of software that will extract most file formats, while on GNU/Linux, most free are bundled with the OS and others usually can be found in your package manager.
[edit] Copying the plugin to the GIMP plugin directory
Open up the folder containing the plugin. Now, copy the files to the clipboard (Select the files, right click one and press copy)
On Windows, go to folder GIMP is installed in (usually somewhere in Program Files). Once in the GIMP's main folder navigate to lib\gimp\*version*\ where as *version* represents the version of The Gimp. Then double click the "plug-ins" folder.
On GNU/Linux, you might need to look around. Plugins will be usually stored under $HOME/.gimp-*.* (where you should replace $HOME with path to your home catalogue and gimp-*.* with the version you use (for example 2.6)), but this will install the plug-in locally. If you want to install it globally, you might have a bit more problem. Some boxes will have plugins stored at /opt/gnome/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ (change lib to lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS), others /usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ (change lib to lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS, although "$whereis gimp" (or "which gimp") command might help. Note that you have to be root to access these files. For example, if the output was /some/place/bin/gimp, then you could check the /some/place/lib (or lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS).
[edit] Testing the plugin
To test the plugin, simply open the GIMP and try the plugin. If this plugin makes a certain image type supported, try opening a file of that type. If the plugin is a filter, test it.
[edit] Troubleshooting
If the plugin appears to not be working, be sure that its for your OS and it is for your version of GIMP.
Also, Script-Fu plugins (*.scm) and python plugins go in their own respective folder, up one level from the regular plugins directory. Python plugins also require gimp-python.
The Script-Fu directory is something like /usr/share/gimp/2.0/scripts/.
