GIMP is not a monolithic program. Much of it is made up of plug-ins, components that are not part of the core of the system. In fact, most of the tools found in the Image: Filters menu are plug-ins, as are many of the tools in the Image: Colors menu. Besides these built-in plug-ins, many third-party plug-ins are available; some of these are quite large, like the GIMP Animation Package (GAP; discussed in Chapter 18). Other, much smaller ones, are used for simple tasks.

Scripts and plug-ins are very similar. One difference is that they are stored in different places. When you open the FOLDER entry in the Image: Edit > Preferences dialog, you’ll see the Plug-Ins and Scripts folders.