If you need to duplicate layer filters/effects from one layer to others, either in the same image or across different files open in GIMP, this plugin makes that a lot easier.
GIMP 3 introduced non-destructive layer filters/effects powered by GEGL. They’re really useful: apply a filter to a layer and it lives there, fully editable, without touching the pixels. IMHO it’s a more clever and elegant non-destructive editing solution than other photo editing apps. But GIMP has no built-in way to copy an effect from one layer to another (the documentation says so).
With the Copy Paste fx plugin, you get two menu items, fx Copy and fx Paste in the Layer menu and the Layers panel context menu. Select your source layer, choose fx Copy, then select your target layer(s), and click fx Paste. Simples!
This plugin started life as the work of a developer who goes by yousei3. They posted it to GIMPChat in early 2026, and it was clear that it came from someone who understood both GIMP’s internals and what photographers actually need. The original code was clean, well-structured, and solved an important problem elegantly.
I’ve built on that foundation to add broader filter support, more robust error handling, and easier installation. But the core idea and the hard work behind it are yousei3’s.
Yousei3 seems to have disappeared. There’s been no activity on his GitHub since early April. If you know yousei3, or know how to reach them, please get in touch with me (https://www.chuckhenrich.com/contact-gdpr/). I’d very much like to thank them directly, and to make sure they know their work is out in the world and being used.
@chuckhenrich That is really nice! Adding copy + paste filters as a UI feature has been on my TODO list for awhile. I have’t done much on the NDE UI because I was hoping we’d switch to a better design, but since that looks like it’ll require GTK4 to be possible, I may pick it back up again.
In the meantime, this is a very useful plug-in that should make people’s lives easier!
I’ve updated the plugin to handle more settings for five layer filters and how they get copied/pasted: Curves, Levels, Hue-Saturation, Color Balance, and Brightness-Contrast.
GIMP stores these filters’ settings in a more complex way than others, which creates a challenge for any plugin that tries to read them. GIMP only exposes the currently selected channel or range to plugins through its API. Previous versions of this plugin could only copy a limited subset of those settings as a result.
I dug into the GIMP source code and found a way around that limitation, so the plugin now reads and copies every channel and every tonal range for these five filters.
There is one catch: GIMP 3.2.6 has a bug that affects how the blend mode and opacity of these five filters gets pasted. The plugin copies them correctly, but if you open a pasted filter to edit it, the dialog immediately resets the blend mode to Replace and opacity to 100%, and those defaults get baked in if you click OK. Clicking Cancel reverts to the pasted values, and you can always reset the blend mode and opacity manually.
The plugin warns you whenever it detects non-default blend mode or opacity on any of these filters, so at least you won’t be caught off guard.
