Daniel Lange's blog

Trixie ships Gimp 3.0.4 and the 3.x series has gotten incompatible to XSane, the common frontend for scanners on Linux.

Hence the maintainer, Jörg Frings-Fürst, has disabled the Gimp integration temporarily in response to a Debian bug #1088080.

There seems to be no tracking bug for getting the functionality back but people have been commenting on Debian bug #993293 as that is ... loosely related .

There are two options to get the Scanning functionality back in Trixie until this is properly resolved by an updated XSane in Debian (e.g. via trixie-backports):

Lee Yingtong Li (RunasSudo) has created a Python script that calls XSane as a cli application and published it at https://yingtongli.me/git/gimp-xsanecli/. This worked okish for me but needed me to find the scan in /tmp/ a number of times. This is a good stop-gap script if you need to scan from Gimp $now and look for a quick solution.

Upstream has completed the necessary steps to get XSane working as a Gimp 3.x plugin at https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane. Unfortunately compiling this is a bit involved but I made a version that can be dropped into /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin and works alongside Gimp and the system-installed XSane.

So:

1. sudo apt install gimp xsane
2. Download xsane-1.0.0-fit-003 (752kB, AMD64 executable for Trixie) and place it in /usr/local/bin (as root)
3. sha256sum /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003
   # result needs to be af04c1a83c41cd2e48e82d04b6017ee0b29d555390ca706e4603378b401e91b2
4. sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003
5. # Link the executable into the Gimp plugin directory as the user running Gimp:
   mkdir -p $HOME/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/xsane/
ln -s /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003 $HOME/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/xsane/
6. Restart Gimp
7. Scan from Gimp via File → Create → Acquire → XSane

The source code for the xsane executable above is available under GPL-2 at https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane/-/tree/c5ac0d921606309169067041931e3b0c73436f00. This points to the last upstream commit from 27. September 2025 at the time of writing this blog article.