A social media export plugin for GIMP: any platforms, one go

Key points

• Export an image for every platform’s dimensions that you select, in one operation
• 33 built-in presets across 9 categories: Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, plus Generic aspect ratios and Scale presets for width- or height-driven resizing
• Create your own Favourites for any size, file format, quality, sharpening, border — or use the built-in presets and set options on the fly
• Output sharpening built in
• Optional border (colour, pixels or percentage, inside or outside the image)
• Optional copyright notice and EXIF metadata deletion
• “Keep export image open” — review exported images as GIMP tabs before saving to disk
• Non-destructive — works on duplicates of your source image; the original is never touched
• Works on duplicates of your source image; the original is never touched
• Requires GIMP 3.2 or later, Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Free and open source

This Social Media Exporter plugin generates sharing-ready images, fast

The challenge: when you want to publish a finished photograph to social media, every destination has its own preferred image dimensions and file format. Getting your image out to all of them means repeating the same manual steps for every one of them: scale, flatten, export, rename. If you want borders, you have to create them manually.

The Social Media Exporter plugin solves all that. Use the built-in presets for the major social media platforms, create your own Favourites for custom sizes, or combine both. Select the presets you need, adjust your export options, and click Export. Every size you checked is produced in one operation, with output sharpening, format and quality control, borders, padding, and metadata handling all taken care of.

Social media and web requirements

Why isn’t File > Export As… good enough?

Every platform has its own rules. Ignore them, and your image post could look bad, or might be rejected altogether.

Dimensions

Each platform has preferred image dimensions for each context: a post, a story, a banner, a thumbnail. Upload an image that doesn’t match and the platform will resize it for you, on its own servers, with no control over how it does it. The result is often softer, more compressed, and sometimes cropped. Get the dimensions right before you upload so the platform has less opportunity to degrade your image.

Output sharpening

Scaling an image down softens it slightly. A small amount of sharpening applied after scaling compensates and gives the image the crispness it had before downscaling. Output sharpening is different from any creative sharpening you may have done. It’s usually a good idea when exporting to social media or web.

File format and quality

Some platforms require JPEG or PNG, others support WEBP. If you’re submitting your image to a social media platform like Bluesky or Facebook, you want your image to contain as much information as possible, so that when they optimise the image for display, they start from a good basis. Alternatively, if you’re exporting your image to display on your website, you want to optimise it for speed so your viewers don’t have to wait for your gallery to load; WEBP will be a better bet.

Metadata

Your camera embeds information in every image file — the camera model, lens, location if GPS was enabled, and more. You may not want all of that information attached to images you publish online. You may also want to embed a copyright notice. Both are worth handling at export time rather than as an afterthought.

Filenames

With multiple platforms and multiple sizes, keeping track of which file is which matters. A consistent, descriptive filename pattern saves time and prevents mistakes.

None of this is complicated in isolation. The problem is doing all of it, for every platform, every time you have an image to publish.

Manually exporting for social media in GIMP

The manual process for preparing an image for social media looks something like this:

1. Scale the image to the first platform’s dimensions.
2. Flatten it.
3. If you want a border:
   1. choose a colour for your border,
   2. set that colour as the foreground or background colour,
   3. calculate the canvas size to incorporate your border dimensions,
   4. resize the canvas — choose Resize layers > All layers, then select Foreground colour or Background colour from the Fill with dropdown, click Resize,
   5. then fiddle with the layers to ensure your image pixels are centred on the canvas,
   6. and undo it all and do it all again if it isn’t right.
4. Select Export As….
5. Rename the file and adjust any export settings for a specific file format.
6. Repeat for the next platform.

If you want a border on each image, you add that manually too, for each one.

It’s not technically difficult. It’s just terribly tedious, error-prone, and slow.

Photoshop users have had tools for this for years. For example, Greg Benz’s Web Sharp Pro is a well-regarded panel that does web export from Photoshop. I’ve used Web Sharp Pro for years, and it served as one of the inspirations for this plugin. But Web Sharp Pro has become a complex tool that goes well beyond what most photographers need for a straightforward social media export. And it requires Photoshop.

The Batcher plugin for GIMP can theoretically do the job. But it requires wading through layers of fiddly dialogs, and the result could be more work than the manual process. If you want different dimensions and different file formats for a single image, you need to do it all one at a time.

Some people find Batcher useful. I think it’s annoying. It adds 9 entries to GIMP’s File menu, almost all of them redundancies that could be gathered into one dialog. It balloons the File menu to take up the entire height of a 1920×1080 screen, and makes you work hard to achieve something that should be simple and straightforward.

Social media export made easy

The Social Media Exporter plugin streamlines the process of generating multiple exports at a time.

Open your finished image in GIMP and launch the plugin from File > Social media exporter…. A two-panel dialog opens, with a preset browser on the left and export options on the right. Check the presets you want, adjust the options if needed, and click Export. The plugin creates the export images for you and saves them where you specify. You can choose to keep all the export images open in GIMP before saving, so you can review or tweak them individually if you wish.

The plugin works on a duplicate of your source image for each preset. Your original is never touched.

The preset browser

The preset browser lists all available presets grouped by platform: Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, and YouTube, plus Generic aspect ratios and Scale presets. Check as many as you need. A search field at the top lets you filter by name if the list gets long.

Built-in presets cover the standard image sizes for each platform.

You can create and edit your own presets (“Favourites”) that include any export options you want. For example, if you regularly export with a specific border style and colour, create your own preset to do just that. More on Favourites below.

Export options

The right panel controls how every checked preset is exported. These settings apply to all built-in presets and to any Favourites that you choose to inherit them.

Format. Choose JPEG, PNG, or WebP. JPEG is the default. Quality is set with a slider (0–100, default 90) and applies to JPEG and WebP. PNG has no quality slider because it’s always lossless.

Output sharpening. The sharpening slider runs from 0 to 200%, with a default of 100%. At 0% no sharpening is applied. At 100% a standard amount of output sharpening is applied after scaling. The slider goes up to 200% to give you headroom for images that need more. Sharpening is applied using unsharp mask in luminance blend mode, which sharpens detail without introducing colour fringing.

Border. Enable a border and set its width in pixels or as a percentage of the image dimensions. Choose whether the border sits inside the image (reducing the image area) or outside it (increasing the canvas). Border and padding share a single colour, set in the padding colour control.

Padding colour. When an image doesn’t fill the preset dimensions exactly, the remaining space is filled with the padding colour. Choose a colour manually, or use the average colour of the image for a result that blends naturally with the content.

Favourites

Favourites are your user-defined presets. Add one by clicking the Add button in the preset browser. Give it a name, set the dimensions, and configure its own format, quality, sharpening, and border settings. A Favourite stores all of its settings independently of the export options panel.

When you select a Favourite in the preset browser, an “Override preset options” checkbox appears in the right panel. Unchecked, the Favourite uses its own stored settings. Checked, the options panel settings take over.

Right-click a Favourite in the preset browser to edit or delete it. Built-in presets can’t be edited or deleted.

Scale presets

Scale presets resize your image to a specific width or height, with the other dimension derived from your image’s aspect ratio. Use them when you need a consistently sized image for your website or a specific display context, without locking in both dimensions. I use this type of preset regularly when preparing my images for my website.

Keep export image open

Enable “Keep export image open” in the export options panel and the plugin opens each exported image as a tab in GIMP instead of saving it to disk immediately. Review every result before committing. When you’re satisfied, a save dialog handles writing all the files at once.

The Info dialog

The button opens a reference dialog with expandable sections. It covers subjects like how to use the plugin and the differences between how it floats on top of GIMP in Linux/macOS vs Windows. If you forget how something works, the answer is likely in there. It saves a trip back to this post.

The Settings dialog

The button opens the settings dialog. The Settings dialog shows the current plugin version and an option to check for updates. You can run the check manually or leave auto-checking on so the plugin checks for you on a weekly basis. I may add additional plugin settings in the future.

Export once. Publish everywhere.

The Social Media Exporter plugin for GIMP 3 makes it easy to publish your work in multiple formats for different social and web platforms. Finish your edit, open the plugin, check your presets, and export. Every platform size you need, produced in one operation, from inside GIMP.

What languages is the plugin available in?

This plugin for GIMP 3 is available in the following languages. You don’t have to do anything to see it in your language. GIMP will automatically load the correct version of the plugin (provided you follow the installation instructions below).

If you have any suggestions to improve those translations, please leave a comment below.

install the Social Media Exporter plugin

This plugin is supported for GIMP 3.2 and later, on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

If you run into any problems with any of the steps below, please let me know in the comments below.

1. Download the plugin

social-media-exporter-gimp3.zip

Download the Social Media Exporter plugin as a ZIP file. You’ll extract it as described below in the next section:

2. Copy the downloaded file to where GIMP looks for plugins

This is something you have to do for every plugin you add to GIMP 3.

Find where GIMP looks for plugins:

1. Open GIMP if it’s not already open and select Edit > Preferences in the GIMP menu.
2. In the Preferences dialog, scroll down the list on the left until you find Folders, then click on the expand icon in front of the word to expand that list.
3. Scroll down the list of folders and select Plug-ins.
4. Still in the Preferences dialog, on the Plug-in Folders panel on the right, locate your plugin folder(s). You can use the folder that’s listed for your user name or add a new one.
5. Click on the “Show file location in the file manager” to open your computer’s file manager.
6. Copy the .ZIP file you downloaded into that folder and extract it there. You should see a subfolder named “social-media-exporter-gimp3”. The plugin is inside that folder (see the note below for why it should be in its own subfolder). Don’t move it, just leave it in that subfolder.
7. Files downloaded from the internet or transferred across systems may not retain their “executable” flag, especially on UNIX-based systems like Linux and macOS. The plugin’s .py file needs the correct permission to be executed as a script. It’s a quirk of the different operating systems’ security models. Windows 11 treats plugin .py files as executable automatically.
   • Linux:
     You should be able to right click on the .py file and set the permission to allow it as an executable (see below for an example screenshot). Or you could set it in your Terminal app with the command chmod +x [PATH TO WHERE YOU EXTRACTED THE PLUGIN FOLDER]/social-media-exporter-gimp3/social-media-exporter-gimp3.py. For example, with GIMP 3 I extracted the plugin folder into a subfolder of Documents, so the command would be chmod +x "Documents/GIMP plugins/social-media-exporter-gimp3/social-media-exporter-gimp3.py".
   • macOS:
     You may be able to right click on the .py file and set the permission to allow it as an executable (see below for an example screenshot). Otherwise, follow these instructions from Apple.

There are two files in the social-media-exporter-gimp3 folder that need to be marked as executable: social-media-exporter-gimp3.py and helpers.py. Do not mark any other files in that folder as executable.

3. Register the plugin with GIMP

Now you have to register the plugin with GIMP: just close and re-open GIMP.

If all has gone according to plan, you should find a menu entry called File > Social media exporter…. If not, please leave a comment below.

4. Optional: create a keyboard shortcut

If you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to the social media exporter menu item, go right ahead:

These instructions are the same as for my other GIMP plugins (Interactive luminosity masks, Frequency separation, Dodge and burn…). Only the plugin names are changed.

Why it’s important to follow these steps

GIMP version 3.x requires that every plugin must live in a folder with exactly the same name as the plugin file. So for example, you add the subfolder where you’ve saved the plugin file to the list of folders where GIMP looks for plugins, and that folder needs to be named exactly the same as the plugin with that subfolder.

This is an example of how working with free software isn’t entirely free. You have to do some of the work that other systems automate, and put your thinking cap on. Bear in mind that GIMP is developed and maintained by volunteers who donate their time and talents as and when they can. So sometimes documentation lags behind development.

FAQ

How do I update the plugin when a new version comes out? Do I lose my configuration?

Open the Settings dialog and click Check for updates, or let the weekly automatic check notify you. If a newer version exists, you’ll get a download link. Installing it follows the same steps as the original install. Your panel configuration is stored separately and is never touched by an update.

Does this work with GIMP 2.10?

No. The Social Media Exporter requires GIMP 3.0 or later and relies on APIs that don’t exist in GIMP 2.10. If you’re still on GIMP 2.10, you’ll need to upgrade to GIMP 3 before installing this plugin.