Python-fu plugin not visible in Gimp

Question

I have built and installed the Resynthesizer plugin for GIMP on Linux. The files appear correctly in the plug-in directory /usr/local/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/, but none of the Python plugins is available in Gimp. For example, the “Filters > Enhance > Heal Selection” command, which I need for this photo@stack answer, is missing.

Executables (in this case “Filters > Map > Resynthesize”) and Script-Fu plugins are available.

The Python-Fu console is available as well.

I am using Gimp 2.8.6 on a Linux Mint.

Edit — Solution found

The reason the plugins were not found is that Gimp did not search in the /usr/local path at all. Taking a look at the folders it scans for plugins, I get the output below. Copying the plugins to /usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ fixed the problem, and the Python-Fu plugins now show up in the menu.

$ LANG='en_US' strace gimp 2>&1 |grep -ne 'plug-ins'
3205:access("/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins", F_OK) = 0
3206:stat("/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
3207:access("/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins/Makefile", F_OK) = 0
3208:stat("/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
3209:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
3211:stat("/home/simon/.local/share/gegl-0.2/plug-ins/Makefile", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=660, ...}) = 0
14788:stat("/home/simon/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
14789:stat("/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=20480, ...}) = 0
14790:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/simon/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 10
14794:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 10

Answer 1

Some Linux distributions make GIMP Python available in a separate package than GIMP. That is ok - however, not installing it by default when GIMP is installed should be considered a packaging bug for the distribution. The trend is that GIMP relies ever more on the Python extensions being available.

Probably the package will be named "gimp-python" - check if it is available and install it.