GIMP Plugin Registry

As a technical editor/writer, I found the need for a plugin to easily crop application screenshots with that somewhat jagged "torn-off" appearance. I found a way to manually obtain the effect I needed, and simply replicated the steps in a Python script, using the gimpfu module.

To install the plugin:
1. Put the Python file in the plug-ins folder in the GIMP settings folder in your home folder (or your user settings folder on Windows). That is, if you're using GIMP 2.4 under Linux, the folder would be ~/.gimp-2.4/plug-ins/ and with GIMP 2.6, ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/. Under Windows, you could go to C:\Documents and Settings\\ and search for folders whose names contain "gimp", then go to the plug-ins folder under that.
2. Under Linux, make the file executable (chmod u+x scrnshot_tearoff.py). This is not required for Windows.
3. (Added thanks to comments) If you don't have Python and PyGTK installed, you'll need to install them. This is most likely to happen for Windows computers; many Linux distributions install Python by default. Head to http://www.python.org/download/ and http://www.pygtk.org/downloads.html for Windows installables; for Linux, use your distribution's package management tool to look for and install Python and PyGTK.
4. (Re)start GIMP.

The plugin puts a "Tear-off" menu item on the Image menu for all image windows only (that is, no menu option is available in the main GIMP Toolbox window's menus). Capture your screenshot, or open a saved image; select the area of the image that you want to keep; click Image > Tear-off to get a dialog where you can modify the plug-in parameters.  read more »