Can't open g'mic with gimp 3

Software G'MIC
21

@weormand, welcome to the board. Sorry that it is under these annoying circumstances. Some questions; bear with me, please.

  1. Did GIMP install executable come from The current GIMP Download page and corresponds to the March 23, 2025 release of Gimp? The Gimp Team has pubished what is known as SHA256 hash sum, used for integrity checking. Your downloaded install executable should match this hash sum when checked by the VirusTotal web site. If that web site reports a different hash, then, possibly, (1) the GIMP download was corrupted, (2) the install executable comes from some other place (3) the install executable is for an earlier version.

  2. Similarly, did you get a stable G’MIC 3.5.3 Windows installer from G’MIC’s download page? The executable and dynamic link libraries (DLL’s) were built against the 3/23/2025 release of GIMP 3.0.2. If your G’MIC installer came from elsewhere, or GIMP came from elsewhere, the possibility of a binary mismatch of some sort becomes very possible.

  3. The kind of error you are reporting suggests that one or more DLL’s are either missing or are incompatible between G’MIC and GIMP. Windows performs compatiblility tests when it loads DLL’s on applications’ behalf and will stop the application and post an error dialog similar to what you saw when compatibility issues arise. Note that when you survey the various folders where relevant binaries and DLL files are kept, you may fimd that all necessary files seem to be in place. Yet Windows will report that files are “missing” when the operating system encounters version incompatibilities. Stricty speaking, Windows is right: there are executables and DLL’s in the file system, but they have found to be incompatible, so, indeed, the compatible files are missing.

  1. I am thoroughly sure that you have. Unfortunately, and by design, Windows Uninstaller doesn’t thoroughly unstall what it installs. It leaves behind any files that may contain user preferences, or binaries that may be shared among different applications. If left-behind binaries pose compatibility issues, these may persist in subsequent re-installs.

My suggestion runs along the line of really, REALLY uninstalling both Gimp and G’MIC; then reinstalling using fresh installers from GIMP and G’MIC - for whatever reason, the installers you used are suspect. When uninstalling, let the Windows Uninstaller to do its work, and then do follow-on hand-removal of persistent debris.

@alain in Post 14 outlines the procedure. Post 17 has links to troubleshooting topics. Hopefully, you or Windows set a restore point just before the initial GiMP/G’MIC installs. Going “back in time” to just before these installs REALLY does a thorough clean-up, because in Windows-time, those installs haven’t happened yet. Just remember that going back to an earlier restore point will “uninstall” everything installed after that point. Hopefully, that would just be GIMP and G’MIC.

1 Like
22

@grosgood Thanks for the prompt reply. I should have mentioned that yes, I did download gimp from the gimp site two days ago, so, yes, correct file, and I did check it with VirusTotal for the correct checksum. And, also I downloaded the latest G’MIC from gmic.eu. And, yes, when I did the uninstall and reinstall I did remove the appropriate folders in between to be sure that all was clean. I have tried installing G’MIC in both the default AppData/Roaming location as well as under the Gimp plugins directory, and a separate directory as suggested by @DragonLady. To no avail. The same error. Which by the way also occurs for the twain.exe plugin that comes with Gimp by default. I also downloaded and “installed” the stand-alone version, and it works. The twain issue is the same error code and would seem to point to an error in setting up the dlls or something else. The Gimp advise seems on twain seems to be to just delete the plugin folder. Which is OK for me since I don’t use it. But, it seems to speak to an issue with the build and compatability. Neither program can be run “stand alone” which I reckon makes sense (that is bringing in the dlls to the directory and running - as the same error occurs).
I haven’t actually tried a restore point, although when reinstalling Gimp, the installer seems to indicate this. This is a bit beyond my expertise level, which shouldn’t be needed. I used this plug-in many times before on my other machine with 2.10 and loved it. It was really useful, so I will be unhappy to lose this capability. But, I also don’t have infinite time to fix it. Both issues occurred immediately after installation.

1 Like
23

Well
 yes. Installing GIMP, then G’MIC, should be easy-peasy, and, reviewing prior posts in this thread, for many it is — and there is no telling how many people have quietly installed both over the past few days and have had no reason to ask for help or even comment.

So why does grief come your way? I don’t know, other than knowing that any procedure, including GIMP/G’MIC install procedures, are mostly generic and cover the usual cases, but they are not perfect and there are always outliers and corner cases. You’re in one — we just don’t know which one. The general help advisories concerning GIMP vis-a-vis GMIC deal with these common cases: (1) G’MIC is in a folder that is (1a) not known to GIMP as a plug-in folder, or (1b) GIMP knows the folder but doesn’t have permission to open it. (2) One of a host of installation mishaps has occurred, leading to a mix of incompatible binaries. (1a) is quite common; it covers @DragonLady case. That solution — creating a new folder — hints at (1b). (1b) “normally” should not happen. The installers routinely set up permissions. You are in abnormal circumstances, however, so it is worth checking if GIMP actually owns or can access plug-in folders.

I believe you are in the (2) class: a bad installation. As I noted, binary Windows installers operate under generic circumstances and make general assumptions. Those assumptions are almost certainly valid on clean installs onto machines that never had GIMP or G’MIC. They are “usually” valid on re-installs,so long as the previous install was successful. It is a 50%/50% proposition if the previous install went awry. Class (2) occurs less often and the remedies are all more-or-less fiddly. Such is the motivation to go back to a previous restore point: it reestablishes the setting where installers are most successful: a clean environment where there are no GIMP/G’MIC debris from previous installs.

That suggests that the binary compatibility issues — whatever they may be — are of a wider scope than just a G’MIC installation issue. I have no suggestions to offer beyond going back to a previous restore point, as drastic as that may be for a “normal user,” and I appreciate your uncertainty on that course of action. Since I, myself, do not use Windows 11 (Linux/Gentoo — I build everything from source), the best I can offer is “Level One Tech Support” for users in the Windows 11 realm; At present, such basic advice has been to no avail, and I can’t be much help with the corner cases. Sorry.

Some people turn to integrated GIMP/G’MIC binary packages built by Samj Creations (French). Sylvie and Michael, posting here as @samj, offer a package where they have integrated GIMP and G’MIC, and provide a recourse for people who have had no success in following the “official” installation routes. If you do follow this route, try to clean up the old installation as much as possible.

Good luck!

24

@grosgood So, I did as you said, a restore point back to 4/4/2025, which is before I downloaded Gimp and G’MIC. A clean install of both of them, downloaded from GIMP and G’MIC sites, and checking the checksum with VirusTotal. So, all should be good as a start. In the end, as I expected, the same result. I also installed the stand alone from the zip file, and it works just fine. How can I check if GIMP has permission to access the directory? Or is there possibly an issue with the surface being an ARM64 PC, as opposed to an x86?
As for plug-in paths, I see them set correctly in GIMP preferences, although I noticed an oddity with the previous install when trying to add a path, it showed a directory “Application Data” instead of AppData, which when selected didn’t show any of the sub directories.

25

OK, so AppData doesn’t show in GIMP window to add a path because it is hidden.

26

Yes, that’s unlikely to work with a ARM64 architecture.
I’m building the G’MIC binaries for x86.

1 Like
27

Ah! Yes. ARM64 is not binary compatible with x86. GIMP Installer contains binary images for both architectures; the installer detects the architecture of your Surface device (ARM64 for you) and installs the correct binary. So — I imagine that GIMP 3.0.2 runs on your Surface machine without G’MIC being installed because the GiMP team is providing ARM64 binaries.

@David_Tschumperle may correct me, but I believe that the G’MIC plug-in for GIMP on Windows is only built for x86, and that binary would not run on an ARM64-based machine. Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPUs on the newer Microsoft Surface machines is still new to G’MIC; I don’t think we officially support it. We are a very small team and I think it is David — just David — is the only person providing the binaries for the Windows install on the G’MIC download page. He will have to weigh in to say if ARM64 is within reach (or, that I’m wrong, he is already providing them). If I am not wrong, and that, indeed, we only provide x86 binaries at the moment, then that is your problem: our G’MIC binaries are x86, not ARM64, and you cannot run them.

I suppose, if that is the case, we should post an advisory on the download page that G’MIC currently provides only for x86, Intel or AMD processors. (Windows users: Click on “Settings”. Select “System”, then “About.” Look at “System Type” under “Device Specifications.”, It will indicate either “x64-based processor” (for a 64-bit Intel or AMD chip) or “ARM-based processor” (for an ARM64 chip). G’MIC binaries do not run under ARM64).

Thank you for reporting!

28

Well, that is a bummer and leaves out quite a few users. That said, the stand-alone product works (although some of the filters have changed from the previous version - I believe there was a Cartoon filter). What doesn’t seem to work is the loading of the plug-in, which is likely due to some issues with loading the .dlls. It would seem to me that this is a matter of communicating between GIMP and G’MIC, that is transferring the image back and forth. I myself am building an application in Visual Studio, and haven’t had any issues with x64 or the ARM64 and the accompanying .dlls. But, Windows is a complicated beast.

29

I’m pretty sure the G’MIC-Qt plug-in could be compiled for ARM64 arch.
Have no time to try it by myself, but the sources are open, so if anyone wants to try it, I’m interested!

30

Windows Visual Studio 2017 (and later) has a concept of the ‘Universal Windows Platform (UWP)’. There are people here a lot smarter than me on compiling on Windows platforms, but from what I read of this, it seemed to be fancy, dressed-up Windows-speak for cross-compilation. In principle, a compiler running under one Instruction Set Architecture (ISA — say, x86) can compile assembly code for another ISA — it is “just” a mapping problem. :smile:

Yep. Clearly ARM64 is moving into mainstream desktop space, so, in time, should we. But as noted before, we are a a very, very small team and this task mainly falls on @David_Tschumperle’s lap, who, I am given to understand, has one or two other things to do in life. Patience, @weormand. This will take time.

31

Understood. It does seem that this is a bit counter to Microsoft’s philosophy - namely full backwards compatibility. Note Microsoft is pushing this change to as they are producing ARM64 platforms. But it can break things. For that matter, it also looks like various other things have changed in GIMP and plug-ins, which probably means that several other plug-ins I used to use won’t work. At any rate, I have several other things going on, and while having GIMP capabilities, it won’t kill me just yet. I could try to do a build following your directions with MSYS2, which has an ARM64 feature, but I suspect that it will complicated as heck not work.

32

I found that when I installed GIMP 3.0 through the Microsoft Store, and then installed G’MIC I ran into the 0xc0000022 problem as a number of DLLs were not found. When I installed GIMP with the .exe, it installed these missing DLLs in the GIMP bin directory and the G’MIC plug was able to run.

Mentioning that here in case anyone else ran into that.

3 Likes
33

Hello i have exactly the same problem as you, now i am trying to install it from official way. Thank you very much

34

Hello, I’m running Linux Mint 22.1, I installed Gimp 3.0.2 via the AppImage on the official website. Unfortunately when I install G’mic plugin in the plugins directory (/home/xxxx/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins) it doesn’t appear, I tested the version for Debian 13 and for Ubuntu 25.04. I installed the “frequency-separation-group-v3” plugin this way and it works.
If anyone can tell me what to do, I’d be grateful.

35

I’m on Debian 13 Trixie (Testing) and just moved to GIMP 3.0

Long story short: To get the gmic_gimp_qt plugin to work, it needs to be in a sub-directory called gmic_gimp_qt

`/home/user/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/gmic_gimp_qt/gmic_gimp_qt`

Longer story:
At first I installed the G’MIC-Qt plug-in for GIMP 3.0 it wouldn’t even appear in the Filters menu.

I noticed this message in the journal

`gimp.desktop Skipping potential plug-in '/home/user/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/gmic_gimp_qt': plug-ins must be installed  in sub-directories`

After a search I found this which says it goes in a sub-directory named the same as the plugin itself.

Hope this helps. :smile:

36

Hmm, doesn’t work for me on Xubuntu 24.04.1. When starting the AppImage from a terminal I see the following lines - but still no G’mic.

Potentiële plug-in '/home/paul/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/gmic_gimp_qt/gmic_gimp_qt' overgeslagen: plug-ins moeten geïnstalleerd zijn in submappen.
/home/paul/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/gmic_gimp_qt/gmic_gimp_qt is a GIMP plug-in and must be run by GIMP to be used
37

Is that the Gimp 3.0.4 appimage from gimp.org ? As far as I know it is based on Debian 12 stable and there is no gimp_gmic_qt package for that.

You could try this one https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZUxTh5ZVQsjmT7JPP8hpStImFT6WXijSh2V

A slimmed down version (96 MB) that “largely” works and comes with the gmic plugin already installed. I use it with kubuntu 24.04 Xubuntu ? remember gimp_gmic_qt plugin does require QT5

Not much lost if it does not work for you, just delete it.

38

Yes, from gimp.org. No need for me to try your link (thanks anyway), I’ll use gmic from the commandline or in an older version of Gimp.

39

Yes, That is what I do, Gimp 2.10 from a 'buntu PPA and an appimage to add python 2.7 support. Plus the Gimp 3.0 appimage to see what all the fuss is about. Since the Gimp 3.0 appimage also comes from a PPA set of .debs, I can compile a gimp_gmic_qt that works, but it is very 'ubuntu 24.04 centric. The appimage is not as “universal” as the gimp.org version.