Hello I’m trying to center an image to the my canvas. how can I do this without using the move tool because doing that has so far been inefficient.
Use the align tool:
Is it center a layer on the background layer ? Looks like you want an even black border.
However, two points
(1) Open a layer using Files → Open as Layers and the layer is automatically centered on the canvas.
(2) The align tool demonstrated in the above link is for Gimp 2.10 Gimp 3.x is a little different.
A 40 second demo of that: https://youtu.be/HIFPdO6AeiE (no audio)