This area gives you access to your main folders and your storage devices. The first time you open this dialog after starting GIMP, Recent will be selected here. This is a special folder that shows the images (see 3) that you have recently opened in GIMP.

Besides the Recent folder, you can find here your Home folder, folders to you documents, pictures and other special locations, as well as your hard drives, external drives and network shares. Left clicking on one of these folders will select that one as the current folder and update the list of images in the image list area (3).

By right-clicking on a folder in this list, a context menu will open. Not all commands will always be available, or enabled. The same context menu is also shown in the bookmark folders list, see (5).

The folder and bookmark list context menu

By default, this shows the path to the current folder. You can navigate to one of the parent folders by clicking on the desired part.

Alternatively, you can enter the name of an image. As soon as you start typing, the list of files (3) changes to show only the one containing the letter combination you entered.

If you need to navigate to another location not available by clicking, you can open a text field where you can type or paste the desired location. To access this use Ctrl+L, then after you have entered the location, press Enter.

	Opomba
	You can use this location entry field to show the contents of a different folder, by entering the location of a folder; or open a specific image by entering the complete path to the image.

The contents of the selected folder is displayed here. Change your current folder by double left clicking on a folder in this panel. Select a file with a single left click. You can then open the file you have selected by clicking on the Open button. A double left click opens the file directly. Please note that you can open image files only.

By default, the list of image files is sorted alphabetically based on the image filenames. The column names above the image list can be used to select how you want the list sorted. Clicking on a column will use that column to sort the list. A small triangle in the column name shows that it is currently being used to sort the list. If the triangle is pointing up, sorting is done ascending. Clicking again on the same column, will changing the sort order to descending and the triangle will be pointing down.

Right-clicking an image or a folder in this list opens a context menu:

The image list context menu

A thumbnail version of the selected image in the image list (3) is displayed in the Preview window on the right. If it is an image format recognized by GIMP, file size, dimensions and image composition are displayed below the preview window.

	Namig
	If your image has been modified, but the thumbnail didn't update, you can click on the Preview image to update the thumbnail. To force updating the thumbnail even if it hasn't changed, use Ctrl + click.

This part of the list shows the folders that you have bookmarked. You can add bookmarks by using the Add to Bookmarks option that is shown when you right-click a folder in the image list panel (3).

You can remove a bookmark by using the Remove command that is shown when you right click on a bookmark. This right click menu can also be used to Rename the bookmark. Renaming the bookmark does not rename the folder it points to.

By clicking the Other Locations label, a list of other known locations and devices on your computer will open in the image list pane. You can use this for easier access to certain locations on your computer that may not be directly available in the folders list on the left.

The Show All Files option, is usually unchecked. If you check this option, all files in the selected folder will be shown, instead of only the image files that GIMP recognizes.

Select File Type can be used to explicitly set the image file format. It is a drop-down list that shows all image file formats that GIMP recognizes. In general you don't need to worry about this, because in most cases GIMP can determine the file type automatically.

The default is Automatically Detected, which causes GIMP to try to automatically detect the correct format.

In the rare cases where neither the file extension nor internal information in the file are enough to tell GIMP the file type, you can set it by selecting it from this list.

	Namig
	Explicitly selecting the file type can be useful in certain cases. You can e.g. do this to explicitly load the merged Photoshop image as saved in a PSD image (if present). Since Photoshop images can't always be correctly loaded in GIMP, this allows you to view the image as it was intended by Photoshop.

With Search you can look for a file or directory, even if you don't know the exact name. Click on Search, type a file name or even just a part of a name in the search box, and press Enter. The file display area (7) will then list all files and directories of your home directory (user directory on Windows) with names containing the text you searched for. Unfortunately you can't restrict the results to files of a specified type (10).

Recently used shows the list of files you have recently opened.