A basic stock of filters is provided with Aten and installed with the program - several default locations are searched for these filters on startup. Alternatively, if Aten fails to find these filters, or you wish to point it to a suitable directory by hand, either the $ATENDATA environment variable may be set to the relevant path (on Windows, this variable is set by the installer) or the --atendata command-line option may be used to provide the path.

Additional filters may be placed in a user's '.aten' directory, e.g. ~bob/.aten/filters/.