The Plugin I Wish Someone Told Me About!
I've been trying to figure out the Scripting in GIMP because there were some image editing I needed to automate. (Lost too many hours in Manual Labor.)
After using many different search terms, I stumbled upon this page: Batch Image Manipulation Plugin! It's a plug-in for GIMP that allows you to edit bunch of files at the same time, and it's quite powerful and versitile.
GIMP is a free alternative to Photoshop. It's an open-source project that's being developed for years, and while it's not as feature heavy or user-friendly as Photoshop, it's expandability and huge community make the program capable of any image editing the Photoshop can do.
Compared to the commercial software, GIMP has a higher learning curve and it might be too hard to switch from easier image editors to GIMP. Especially when other alternatives like Krita exist.
Since anyone can create Plug-ins for GIMP, people (who have managed to figure out scripting) made plugins for everything. I didn't use many of them especially since many of them are not easy to install, but if you're using Windows, BIMP comes with its own installer that installs the plugin to the "File" section of your GIMP software.
The reason I needed to script on GIMP in the first place was because I needed things I couldn't do with other free batch (at least the ones I knew, like ImageMagick.) I was afraid that BIMP would be the same, and I was wrong!
The normal options in BIMP are not really that interesting, they cover simple things like Cropping, Resizing, Flip/Rotation. It also does some advanced features like Color Correction and adding Watermarks. They're very useful but are pretty basic...
What makes it appealing though is the option to use advanced scripts in it, without the need to actually script! Which is great because I can't use the normal Crop method to get the result I wanted but I can use the Crop Script to do it. Which will save me few hours, (Days,) in the long run!
I still think I should learn how to script on GIMP though, but now I don't have to be impatient about it. If you know where I can find a tutorial on this, please let me know.
I hope this article was useful to you! If you know someone using GIMP please let them know, because I really needed to read something like this until yesterday.
