How can this be an unknown file type?

[Ofnuts]

(06-14-2024, 01:09 AM).ajax Wrote:

(06-13-2024, 10:43 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: ...
Do you see the file type listed in the file type selector?
...

No!  That list is completely empty.  Contains nothing.

I'm afraid that list is something I can NOT remember ever using.  However, because I run GIMP in portable fashion I am able to run other versions.  This shows me there should be a rather long list of possible file types.

Is there a simple explanation that might allow for fixing the problem or am I stuck with reinstalling GIMP?  Also, it must be something that I caused without knowing.  What about causes?  Are there known, apparently improper actions, that would cause this problem?

All the file import/export are plugins. So the file that contains the code (file-png.exe, file-jpeg.exe) should be in on of the directories where Gimp looks for plugins. So you go to Edit  > Preferences > Folders > Plugins and this should list at least two directories:

• One somewhere in the Gimp installation tree, normally {wherever_Gimp_is_installed}\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins\
  
• One somewhere in your user data
  

Verify that the first one exists and that it contains a score of file-something.exe. If not, you can search a file-png.exeand see if its parent directory contains the other file-*.exe and add these to the Plugins directory list.

One last possibility is that the Gimp configuration is OK but some paranoid part of windows has disabled the execution of these files that are not in the standard  location for executable files, in which case this becomes a Windows problem.