API References

GIMP comes with libraries which can be used by plug-in developers to enhance their usage of the software. This page lists documentations for the Application Programming Interfaces (API) of these libraries:

GIMP 2.0 API : for versions 2.0 up to 2.10.
GIMP 2.99 API : experimental API (moving target) for future version 3.0.

Additionnally you may want to use some of the following interfaces:

Babl API : GIMP’s pixel encoding and color space conversion engine.
GEGL API : GIMP’s image processing engine.
GTK, Pango, GdkPixbuf and more… : more dependencies used by GIMP and libgimp.

Offline API references

Download

If you don’t want to read the API documentation online, you may also download the source tarballs from our download server . They contains pre-generated API documentation in HTML format in devel-docs/libgimp*/html/ folders.

On distribution, the API reference HTML may also be provided with the development package or as separate packages. For instance, on Debian, the package libgimp2.0-doc would usually be the one containing these files.

For GIMP 3.0, the pre-generated documentation will be in a dedicated tarball.

Generate

If you wish to generate them, as part of your development process, here is the procedure, as part of the rest of the building procedure :

GIMP 2.10

Configure with --enable-gtk-doc and --enable-gtk-doc-app:

configure --prefix=$GIMP_PREFIX --enable-gtk-doc  --enable-gtk-doc-app

If you got the sources directly from the git repository rather than a tarball, use autogen.sh instead of configure.

The parameters have the following meaning:

--enable-gtk-doc: use gtk-doc to build documentation
--enable-gtk-doc-app: build developer documentation for app (not only the libgimp* libraries).

To find out more parameters, run configure --help GIMP_PREFIX is a variable for the directory you will install GIMP in, as explained in the Building GIMP page.

Build GIMP normall:

make
make install

Find the generated documentation:

cd $GIMP_PREFIX/share/gtk-doc/html

From the desired subdirectory open the file index.html for an overview of that module.

GIMP 2.99

Meson build system

Similarly the meson build provides the option -Dgi-docgen=enabled to make sure the documentation built by gi-docgen are enabled. These are the main documentation for the libgimp and libgimpui APIs.

We also have a -Dg-ir-doc=true option which will build language specific API with yelp and g-ir-doc-tool, for some of the languages supported by GObject Introspection. We are still pondering whether these documentation really bring much, over using the main API references and some per-language tutorial explaining how to port each calls to specific bindings.

Manual `g-ir-doc` generation

This is what -Dg-ir-doc=true does internally. You might want to reproduce these steps for another language binding, to generate and browse libgimp API docs, for a language binding, from your local GI repository:

This assumes you are a builder, have installed tools for GObject Introspection such as g-ir-doc-tool, have installed the GNOME help tool yelp, and that when you built or installed GIMP, it created the .gir files.

Run:

g-ir-doc-tool --language=Python -o ~/gimp-python-docs /usr/local/share/gir-1.0/Gimp-3.0.gir