carol.gimp.org

Plug-in Preview Size

TheGIMP received a major overhaul on its previews between gimp-1.2 and Gimp2. TheGIMP shows these previews at a nice size without additional tweaking, however if you would like these previews to be larger or smaller you can edit a file to make them the size you are more comfortable with.

The default plug-in preview size (shown here) is 150 pixels by 150 pixels. Changing the size of your previews will require the use of a text editor.

A simple edit to achieve 256x256 pixel plug-in previews

Simply removing one character from your gtkrc file found within TheGIMP's own directory which should be ~/.gimp-2.2/gtkrc unless you or your system administrator changed that during the installation. It is highly recommended to make these changes within the gimps own resource directory, as the gimp tends to use these gtk widgets more than other apps.

#
# Adjust the size of previews in plug-in dialogs:
#
style "gimp-large-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 256                                                             
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-large-preview"                                           


  

Simply remove the "#" from the class line:

#
# Adjust the size of previews in plug-in dialogs:
#
style "gimp-large-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 256
}

class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-large-preview"


  

Save this text file again and restart TheGIMP.

Your Gimp2 plug-in previews will now be much larger. You can change it back by putting that character back in front of the class line in the gtkrc file.

It takes a little more work with the text editor to get a size different than the default 150 x 150 pixel area or this easy 256 x 256 pixel area.

Create your own plug-in preview size class

The "commented out" (the "#" symbol in the gtkrc file causes this line to be ignored when gtk looks for instructions in this file on how to draw its widgets) class line in the gtkrc and the style definition above this line could also be treated as an example of how to make your own set of classes for plug-in previews.

#
# Adjust the size of previews in plug-in dialogs:
#
style "gimp-large-preview"                                                                 
{                                                                                          
  GimpPreview::size = 256                                                                  
}                                                                                          
                                                                                           
# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-large-preview"                                           

  

Following this example, I made a few more plug-in preview classes for different preview sizes.

#
# Adjust the size of previews in plug-in dialogs:
#
style "gimp-small-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 144
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-small-preview"



style "gimp-medium-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 192
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-medium-preview"



style "gimp-large-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 256
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-large-preview"



style "gimp-very-large-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 382
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-very-large-preview"



style "gimp-huge-preview"
{
  GimpPreview::size = 576
}

# class "GimpPreview" style "gimp-huge-preview"


  

Now it is time to try my new preview plug-in classes to see how they look and if they might work better for me. You can highlight and paste them from this web page or download the gtkrc from here and and try them yourself or -- better yet, write and try your own class.