Using GIMP to create Tileable Textures

There are a lot of good texture libraries currently available online at the moment. Some which are absolutely top-notch. One of my personal favourites is Lost and Taken but there are numerous list posts (like this one at Web Design Ledger) which point to more.

Now these textures are great but you are probably going to have to use some really large images if you want to use them on your site, and I really didn’t want to have to. Thankfully the GIMP includes a filter to make an object seamless, which means you can tile it effectively as the page background of your site.

To make an image file tileable, simply open the image in GIMP, and then from the Filters menu, select Map > Make Seamless. No options are required, it just works (see below for a before and after pics).

Before

Before

After

After