GIMP Development Update
gimp.orgI don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years, once you learn where things are I can get what I need done. The learning curve (finding where functions are, the right tools for each job, etc.) wasn't much different from other software like Blender or Darktable (or even Davinci Resolve).
The panels concept might be the most intuitive part of it, but Blender also has different panels and modes. And the tools being combined into few buttons is similar to CAD programs I've used.
Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems (and not pedantry like "the spacing of these buttons is uneven"?) Perhaps I've gotten used to using unintuitive software.
Export and Save As should be the same menu item with an option in the dialog.
There are many many more but start with the app having the overbearing assumption that it thinks you want save to its file format rather than make an ad hoc edit.
That “overbearing assumption” is made by practically every other X-media editing app, for good reason — you can save your work and continue/revert stuff later. If all you’ve ever used is MS paint then I guess it’s an unexpected thing, but any other image/video editing app, digital audio workstation, 3D modeling software, etc… work exactly the same way. It would be unexpected to me if “save as” exported a flat file.
I don't care. 99% of my uses of an image editor are for ad hoc edits. I never want to clutter my disk with project files on the off-chance I want to preserve layers or whatnot. I have zfs snapshots and cloud backups should I want to revert but the odds I want to revert an ad hoc image edit are approximately nil - I can never recall needing to do so.
I don't use Gimp as a 3D modeling software or a digital audio workstation. I use it to add text to a family photo. The primary storage medium is jpeg. I don't want or need anything else.
The real issues with Gimp start when you try to work with selections, transforms, cuts, crops and so on. Photoshop muscle memory doesn't transfer and it is so incredibly clunky.
> I use it to add text to a family photo. The primary storage medium is jpeg. I don't want or need anything else.
So you open your photo, add your text, press Ctrl+E, choose a filename or press Enter to overwrite your old version, and press Enter to accept the default jpeg settings.
I guess it could save a couple of keypresses by auto-overwriting your original file without asking, or not asking about jpeg settings. But it doesn't seem like an outrageous workflow, considering that other people will want those options.
I do feel the same way as you about Photoshop muscle memory, having got quite good at it in the '90s and never really having caught up in Gimp.
Then Gimp is the wrong tool for you. You’re using a excavator to pull out weeds. Use Pinta or KolourPaint instead.
Gimp doesn't save undo history in the XCF.
I guess the idea is you can do edits via non-destructive layer effects and compositing a stack of layers, where somewhere amongst the stack is your original unmolested data. Though that has not been my experience with Gimp - it's far more likely to want to to commit to a rasterizing decision far earlier than Photoshop would.
The difference between exporting and saving is extremely important, and is something the user must understand in order to prevent data loss.
And Gimp users are not more likely to know that? It adds up to extra clicks for 90% of the images I load.
how does the save/export distinction result in extra clicks? they are in the same menu right below each other. pick the right one. if you don't know you may pick the wrong one the first time, but after that you know. i find it faster than having to choose the format i want from a "save as" dialog
It's when I want to close the image or the application - the extra click to confirm that, yes, I am aware this image was not "saved" and that I could be losing data. I admit I have not looked into whether I can disable that extra notification.
ok, fair point. i agree, that's a bit annoying. and ideally it should also tell whether changes are made after exporting.
You just reminded me of a great feature that I think I first noticed in The Gimp: you don't have to search through the list of file types when exporting (I almost typed "saving"!), just type the extension in the file name and it'll save in that format! Love that part.
> Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems
The latest one I can recall is the canvas losing focus when you click anywhere outside it. So, to continue working after you interact with the layers panel e.g., you'll need to go through the extra step of reactivating the canvas.
The learning curve certainly is a lot steeper than Photoshop or similar tools, and the GUI is very much counter intuitive compared to other graphics tools. Add that it lacked tons of nondestructive editing, smart objects etc. The poping out of different panels also get annoying super quick.
Plus, it almost does not change between releases, so you need to learn it only once.
The few times when I tried to use a recent version of Photoshop, however, I could not figure out even basic stuff like layer masks,
I'm a fairly casual / infrequent user, but they've already addressed most of the things I found infuriating in the past.
The big remaining thing I can think of is the "layer boundary" thing, which (it seems to me) is very confusing for new users and inconvenient for all users.
I also have a vibes-based feeling that when I used to use Photoshop twenty-five years ago I was a lot more productive than I'm able to be in GIMP, but I can't be sure if that's just because I used to do more graphic stuff back then and I've never picked it up to the same degree. I find myself having to hunt for things in menus a lot, but that might be a me problem. Photoshop also took a while to get used to.
Edit: I basically agree with the people complaining about Save and Export being unexpectedly separate, although also it's not that hard to press Ctrl+E instead of Ctrl+S.
>"I don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years..."
That's the problem, you have a bias because you've already learned the tribal knowledge. Having to learn it from scratch, GIMP's UI is sorely lacking. While it does have the tools, the organization of them is all over the place.
I have used Photosohop for almost 20 years, and then Affinity, Krita, and Gimp here and there. In my opinion, it's a bit of both. At first I thought I was just used to Photoshop and I had to just accept losing productivity to make the switch. But there something about Gimp UX that I can't get over, even though I can't really explain what is it. Of course fighting the muscle memory for all the features is a pain, but there's more. I can't find logic in the shortcuts, the menu organisation... I have not struggled as much for Krita or Affinity when I tried it.
Are you sure that the problem isn't just that you have learned a different tribal knowledge (e.g. Photoshop) and now expect every image application to work that way?
At no point did I mention myself or what programs I know.
>I don't get everyone's complaints about the interface. I've been using it for years
This made me chuckle.
For decades, the tools panels floated separately from the image window, and the authors resolutely refused to put them in a single window.
Then one day, they did it. They put the tools on the same window as the image, as Deluxe Paint did in 1985. FINALLY.
... but at the same time, they introduced the absolute bollocks that is "if you hit save we're going to spam you indefinitely into using our format".
In any other tool, if you _open_ a file (e.g. a PNG, JPEG, or in say LibreOffice's case, a CSV or XLSX), and then hit "save", it can nag you once that you're not using the tool's preferred file format, and _may_ be missing some important feature that only its preferred format supports... but you should just be able to click "fuck that, save it as the format I loaded it as" and not hear that again.
Not GIMP. It fucking well refuses to let you save as the format you opened. You have to cancel your "save" of the file you opened, and instead "export" to the file you opened... at which point it warns you you'll overwrite THE FILE YOU WANT TO SAVE. And after you've done that, and try to close the image, it'll warn you you haven't saved THE FUCKING FILE IT JUST FORCED YOU TO USE "EXPORT" TO SAVE because you didn't save it in its preferred format ABSOLUTELY GO FUCK YOURSELF, GIMP, I AM NOT GOING TO SAVE AS XCF A JPEG I AM CROPPING AND WILL NEVER EVER EDIT AGAIN
This is why I completely gave up on GIMP and will never open it again. I would like to line up all the GIMP authors in a row, and run down the line slapping them all in the face with a wet trout.
If anyone from GIMP is listening:
* User opens a non-native format, e.g. JPEG * User hits "Save" * Present user with a dialog like so: This image may contain content that cannot be saved in the currently selected file format "JPEG" Use the default XCF file format to be sure the image is saved correctly [x] Ask when not saving in XCF or default format [Use JPEG format] [Use XCF format] * User can turn off this nag globally by deselecting "Ask when not saving in XCF or default format" * If user selects "Use JPEG format", future saves of this file will not nag againHonestly, this is fair.
You know what? The hate GIMP gets in the comments is entirely self-inflicted. Everyone praises Krita and Blender because their UIs are consistent and look good. GIMP, on the other hand, looks like a toddler worked on it: switches are huge compared to text, buttons and text have no padding and are squeezed together, and icons are oversized and scattered everywhere.
People might say, "You can just join the project and fix it yourself." But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.
I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes. GIMP is a UX atrocity. The interface is a cluttered mess of meaningless panels and buttons. Worst for me is i'd spend 15 mins googling/reading how to do something, look for the corresponding buttons for 10 minutes, be unable to find them, and later discover they were on a panel that wasn't enabled by default (I didn't even know you had to enable panels; i'd assumed everything that was available was there in front of me). On macOS some panels randomly disappear behind other programs.
It was like using a computer program in your dreams where things don't really have to make sense.
My theory is this is a classic OSS problem where everyone wants to contribute their pet feature but the project lacks discipline and nobody wants to remove, organise, and improve (especially where the latter can be 10x harder and more tedious then the former). This could be an argument for opinionated leaders in OSS projects, because at least they'll say 'no' and do things 'their' way a lot of the time, which is often better than the 'anything goes' philosophy.
It's been like this forever. Always been "photoshop but harder to use".
Friendly reminder to everyone that https://photopea.com exists. If you are used to Photoshop, then the UI will be quite familiar.
I only need to do somewhat basic stuff these days, so photopea.com is more than enough for me. However, now that I look it has tons of new features. Nothing to install, is ad-sponsored by default, and runs entirely client-side.
IIRC, this is a lone developer, who has previously refused what seemed like lucrative catch & kill acquisition offers.
Here is a post with lots of info:
> I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes.
You would have been just as lost, if not more, in Photoshop (if you had never used it before.) You were doing a simple job that should have been done in a simple program.
We actually have a design site where we ask for user feedback and UX/UI improvement suggestions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...
I share this link a lot in the hopes that more people take us up on it, and provide specifics on where problem areas are for their workflow. So many people use GIMP in so many different ways, even something that seems "obviously bad" to one group might not be encountered by others.
Thoughts on posting a UX and/or workflow related Issue under Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux that would pretty much just recite an existing Issue from GNOME/gimp?
One of our contributors does a lot of upkeep work, and he normally ports UX-related issues from the code tracker to the UX repo. Not 100% perfect, but it helps keep the focus in the right spot.
Am I reading this right in that I should avoid doing it myself then?
If you think it's UX related concern, then I'd recommend posting it on the UX tracker first. But even if it's posted in the "wrong place", it'll likely be moved to the right one after it's looked at, if that makes sense?
However, if you see an older issue that could use some UX design discussion, feel free to suggest it be moved.
Why not add a "Photoshop" theme? You select it in some option or on install, and it turns into something looking like Photoshop.
We're working on an extension platform, and once that's up and running we'll probably reach out to PhotoGIMP developers (https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp) and see if they want to host it there.
Then people can easily download and install it directly in GIMP, hopefully making everyone happy.
From tfa
> A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.
I see no active resistance. If you have feedback, maybe share it with them?
Between GIMP releases we saw entire graphics pipelines, conventions and workflows come and go. We had the Affinity suite, Canva, Paint.net, Clip Paint Studio, Sketch, various attempts from Adobe at expanding beyond the Photoshop ecosystem (Anyone remembers XD?), probably something else I’m missing right now. Now we’re in the age of Figma, with its own UI and quirks.
At this point it’s probably easier to accept that the GIMP UI is simply what GIMP developers want it to be.
True, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the same could be said about Turbotax, Jira, SAP… or God may have mercy on your soul, Avid Pro Tools.
It is what it is. It’s not like there are no alternatives anymore.
The attitude partly affects GNOME too, any time you'd constructively criticize it on places like their Issue tracker or r/gnome, their defenders would come with pitchforks at you. Glad I moved to KDE nearly a decade ago.
Gnome does UX and UI very well, though.
It could also be that the Gimp team and community wants their software a certain way, and I don't see why one should disrespect that?
Those who disagree are welcome to fork- and maintain it, if the users see value in it, they'll switch.
It's just sad. Nobody wants to fork it because nobody uses GIMP, so forks get almost no traction. People love the effort and commitment, install it, try it for a couple of tasks, fail, and never come back. It has built up this reputation of being terrible, and no one wants to give it a second chance after their first impression.
I think it's a lesson in how not to run an open-source project. I put it in the same category as Darktable, which gives off that exact same bad first impression.
> People love the effort and commitment, install it, try it for a couple of tasks, fail, and never come back.
If you just tried Photoshop 2 or 3 times, you'd fail to get anything accomplished either. GIMP is a Photoshop replacement, not an MS Paint replacement.
Maybe the problem is that not everyone needs Photoshop, or to learn a tool at all, and GIMP comes as standard on every Linux install. Most people never have a need for it. They only need MS Paint (or rather Paint.NET or Krita.)
Thinking that you should be able to just roll in and immediately get stuff accomplished on Photoshop or GIMP is a misjudgment of the skill it takes to use professional tools.
GIMP's UI is fantastic, and its capabilities are incredible.
edit: another problem is that people make a living from using Photoshop because it's an industry standard, so they're motivated to learn it. For GIMP you had to take the same effort to learn something that you couldn't use professionally. Hopefully the improvements on color and non-destructive editing will improve the situation on that front. It's becoming something that, if I have the latitude, I can use on the job at a print shop.
If you just tried Photoshop 2 or 3 times, you'd fail to get anything accomplished either.
This is is simply not true. Photoshop is popular even with non-tech users because it is possible to do things in Photoshop without having to figure out an illogical UI.
darktable is at least slowly actually getting better... I like what blender managed to do.
Finally, specific criticisms that aren’t “it’s not Photoshop!”
I honestly think a lot of the hate that GIMP gets is because as the first major FOSS image editor, people tried to use it for everything with a lot of square hole round peg situations.
In particular, it’s a photo editor at core. You can use it for postprocessing of other image types if you want, or for pasting together memes or whatever. But it’s not designed for e.g. doing illustrations or digital painting or sketches
This isn’t even unique to GIMP in that way. Photoshop is also a sub par art program (though admittedly they’re a little more flexible than GIMP). But if you wanted something better for than Photoshop and were ok with proprietary windows/mac software there’s clip studio paint and before that there was paint tool sai etc.
While until the rise of Krita being actually good (having tried it many times over the years prior, that’s some time around 2018) if you wanted Linux or just wanted FOSS, you had to use Gimp and that breed resentment at it being the wrong tool
I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.
I enjoy Blender, but it's a specialist application with a highly complex, mostly unintuitive user interface that requires training and has a steep learning curve.
When people start using Blender, they generally start with a written or video tutorial series and are prepared to put in hours to get productive.
I'm sure Blender's UI is fine for what it does, but it's certainly not any easier to use than e.g. LightWave/Modo/Cinema4D was, and arguably harder.
Are people really saying GIMP is somehow harder than that?
>I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.
From the very beginning it was trying to be an alternative to Photoshop, you know a software used by the professional industry, and 30 years later we are not sure it's any closer to that.
Whereas Blender is not just an alternative to Maya, 3DS Max and all the other options but might even be the leading software in its domain
Now imagine the world if the GIMP team had the epiphany the Blender team had a few years ago
What was their epiphany?
Blender in the early days before the UI upgrade was like GIMP now: irrationally difficult to use.
Blender is still not beginner-friendly, but that's true of all 3D modeling software. There's a limit to how friendly you can make the UI without making it burdensome to accomplish things.
GIMP is just user-hostile, and deliberately so. GIMP's UI is not laid out logically, nor does its illogical UI make possible any additional functionality. The programming team has made such minimal effort to make the UI better that it's big news when they make even minor UI improvements.
Autosave sounds nice, I’m excited to have that!
I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.
Zipped XML
Preparation for the future XCF (24.09.2023)
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/10076
Someone proposed newer ser-/deserialization approaches, but this didn't result in a discussion.
That someone is actually the maintainer of GIMP, and the person who is currently developing the new format (unless you mean one of the commenters, not the person who made the initial post).
I mean the one of the commenters, since the maintainer asked for comments.
Zipped xml i wouldn't tbh. Its just not a great random access container. Compressed xml in a sqlite? Sure.
Zipped XML? Isn't that just OpenRaster? (which is already supported by GIMP anyway, but also supported by Krita and other image editors)
We didn't go into it in the news post, but one of the big benefits of this new format is that we can sync GeglBuffers (how pixel data is stored) automatically between GIMP and the new file. So you'll get fast auto-saves as you edit, which we couldn't do with OpenRaster. Also, the OpenRaster standard doesn't support all the features of GIMP/Krita (like non-destructive filters for instance).
(Also, currently our OpenRaster support is a plug-in that calls our PNG plug-in to do the rendering, so we'd have to rewrite it to be a core process if we wanted to use it as our main project file).
> Krita and other image editors)
Krita is not an image editor but a digital painting program. GIMP is a much more complete image editor despite its quirks.
Krita is good at editing images, so it is an image editor. It is also good at digital painting, and that's where much of its development focus lies.
It's not that weird. Most of Office and Open office formats are just zipped folders of XMLs.
Better Zipped XML than whatever monstrosity Adobe files are. PDF/PSD... shudder.
Yep, even music software like Ableton Live is using zipped XML for the project files (although the much bigger audio files are stored independently in sub-folders). There were even efforts to use the XML format to manage Ableton project files with git in order to have a nicer change history (https://github.com/clintburgos/ableton-git).
> with git
I suddenly imagine a zip format with built-in git. Does this already exist?
Basically a file-format that has built-in history, rollback, logs etc. Enabling all these "zipped XML" formats to get this feature "for free".
Could be as simple as adding the .git to the zip and ensuring the software that writes the content to the zip also runs the correct git operations.
But could also be a simplified subset and adding git-ability to the (de)compress libs and bins, which can operate on the compressed .git. Simplified, because it won't need networking/remotes probably not even branches.
Involuntary reflex reply: ship an SQLite database as your data file?
Quick edit: hmm, I'm already ~1 hour late, the relevant thread starts at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327457
> I suddenly imagine a zip format with built-in git. Does this already exist?
OSTree, SQLite (single file DB), OCIRepository, git bundle. But it depends if you rather need code diffs or just versioning of large binary blobs (an image editor needs the latter).
I mean, zipping files in an archive and presenting them as a file is an ancient tradition in video games. For example Warcraft 3 used the MoPaQ archive to store data in .w3x file.
And Starcraft 2 data is just bunch of XML files.
Except MoPaQ weren't zips IIRC, they had their own clever format here - at least the OG StarCraft / SCBW MoPaQs were, playing with that is what I learned binary data handling on :). The idea of zipping data files applies, of course (and many a game used a literal ZIP with custom extension).
But there's one material difference between StarCraft/Warcraft and Gimp: in Blizzard games, those were "zips" of heavy data files, notably read only data blobs. The game would read them, unpack in memory, and serve appropriately. Most of that data was key-value, text resources, or flat assets - images, sfx. With Gimp, we're talking highly structured data that's continuously being mutated. Very much not the best representation for that, even if you're just persisting it. They're only getting away with this because of SSDs - on spinning rust, you'd feel this.
(Also worth noting that, at least in StarCraft/SCBW, most of the files inside were custom, well-optimized binary formats. This predated the XML insanity of encoding data with 90%+ markup overhead.)
> Except MoPaQ weren't zips
I meant zipping colloquially as in compressing an archive format. But you seem to get the gist of it ;)
> in Blizzard games, those were "zips" of heavy data files, notably read only data blobs. The game would read them, unpack in memory, and serve appropriately.
Not just game files but also the map format for Warcraft 3 was a glorified MPQ (source: https://867380699.github.io/blog/2019/05/09/W3X_Files_Format).
So whenever you edited a WC3 map, you were zipping the current map into an archive. Much like the GIMP example. Of course, WC3 didn't use as many XML files, though SC2 changed that.
Cool, I didn’t know that! But makes a lot of sense.
From https://github.com/zepouet/Xee-xCode-4.5/blob/master/XeePhot...:
// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having // worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire // that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns. // If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different // places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those // too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide // that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement // should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, // or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. // Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, // of course, uses all three, and more. // Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of // your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th // birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but // at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people // responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format. // Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch // them on a spaceship directly into the sun. // // PSD is not my favourite file format.
GIMP is excellent software. I've been using it at least every couple of days for 20+ years, and it's never once crashed or given me any kind of reliability issue, has always done the trick, and has been extremely resistant to enshittification. It's a reliable workhorse I'd always trust to insert into a workflow.
Thanks to all the contributors.
Basically every complaint about GIMP is also valid for photoshop. People claiming PS is "intuitive" or "easy to use" literally just means they already know the keybindings/icons/quirks of photoshop specifically. It's okay! I have the exact same experience the other way around when I have to use photoshop
This isn't true. There have been plenty of other applications (Corel, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Krita etc) with their own workflows and keybindings that weren't confusing for users.
GIMP's UX is just bad. I loathe photoshop and desperately want to like GIMP, but each time I make the attempt the friction is too much and the workflows nonsensical. I used it a few weeks ago to place two images side by side in a larger canvas. It took half an hour in this mental little app to figure out how. I haven't have any issues with Inkscape and even Darktable ended up making sense. This is squarely a Gimp thing. Paraphrasing Kat Williams, "If people are calling you a crackhead for 20 years, you're smoking crack."
As usual, whenever GIMP is involved, all we get are negative, often unfounded comments about an excellent piece of free software that is massively used and developed with very limited resources, doing its job really well.
There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.
I’m going to take the bait:
I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. GIMP is the perfect example of that and generally speaking UI/UX is the main symptom.
Blender was able to move forward by not listening to the FOSS crowd but to the industry. And see where are they now compared to GIMP.
important here to remember that Blender was created within the industry as a commercial tool. When open sourced the leader of the project remained and knew quite well what separated a good creative tool from a bad one. It was always situated in a position where the core users were either hobbyists or professionals.
Gimp was never in such a situation.
Culture is important.
> Culture is important
Which brings us back to why so many people dislike Gimp, and/or see it as a posterchild example of bad FOSS alternatives.
I agree, and Culture IS important. And I think the culture around many Open Source "Alternatives" is harming themselves and the overall FOSS community. From Mastodon via Gimp to Nextcloud.
Even the name is self sabotage.
It's a clever name. What's your beef with it?
If I told my parents I'm "using GIMP", I will get some very concerned looks.
It's a term often interpreted as derogatory for a group of people. (Disabled people)
What? How? GIMP is just some latex thing, what does it have to do with disabled people?
you haven't heard about it because it's no longer commonly used (for good reason), but it's there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimp#Other_uses
So GIMP has a larger user base than Blender, what is your point ?
I don't know what it has to do with anything - GIMP has been around for a while and has been the de facto FOSS alternative for photoshop for so long. That doesn't make that several of its UX and UI decisions are at least questionable nor make that comment you're replying any less true.
Not to mention the fact that if you ever mention in any way that GIMP's UX/UI could be better to anyone of its veteran devs they would turn weirdly ultra defensive and take everything personal.
Blender is something routinely recommend by normies. Gimp is not.
Blender is a very popular, maybe the most popular, for the tasks its used for. Gimp is not.
Market share might be more relevant when we're comparing products with different market sizes.
I love that GIMP exists but... I have to say, it never got rid of the "backend developer doing frontend" feeling, and I've been aware of Gimp for 20 years now (did not know how to...ehem, run photoshop in my teens)
… and the sizes of their updates are usually impressive! Seems to be a big project that is managed well to keep a good pace and keep the community in the loop. (Although I don’t know much about their inner workings.)
Do you have your special dark mode glasses on?
Because I fail to see all the comments here as negative and unfounded. (and my guess why there is often negativity towards GIMP, is because it was too often advertised as a adequate Photoshop replacement, which it is not, so people got disappointed with it)
It's a great piece of software. Best feature - not having your colours retrospectively removed from your project [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/rdtodb/adob...
Photoshop is removing something that GIMP doesn't even have - PANTONE colors.
We added import support for most Photoshop palette formats (ACB, ACO, ASE), so you can use them in GIMP. I don't think we can directly include Pantone palettes in the install because of copyright issues, but if you already have them, they should work fine in GIMP (and if not, let us know so we can fix it!)
Not adding format features that you are not willing/able to maintain in perpetuity is a positive, yes.
Yes, it is very pleasant to have it around. Especially when you switch to something else.
Furthermore, it's free software. If people have a problem with it, they're free to show up and contribute, or fork if the community is really opposed to their ideas (they probably are for good reason, though).
I can guarantee that anyone turning up and contributing or forking this project will not lead to the outcome of a improved piece of software.
It will lead to someone with the insight on how to make actual material improvements frustrated and angry that they don't have the technical skill (or time) to grapple with a complex codebase, and the people with the technical skill working on the codebase dismiss people with actual knowledge in different domains.
"Patches welcome" is not any kind of welcome. It's basically a euphemism for "fuck off, I don't want to have a conversation to make something better, I just want to hack on Feature X".
So basically you want subordinates who work for you for free.
> "Patches welcome" is not any kind of welcome. It's basically a euphemism for "fuck off
Yeh, this line is very common in that project that rhymes with chrome.
Meanwhile contributed features get stuck at "needs design team" for years.
Non-destructive filter layers caught my eye, and has been something I've missed since moving off Windows/Photoshop to Linux. Looking around it seems like they introduced this in V3, which is great to see.
Haven't those existed in Krita forever?
That is probably the V3 feature I'd notice most in daily use. Non-destructive editing makes experimentation much less costly; without it, every “maybe this looks better” becomes another layer or file copy.
I just installed Ubuntu 26.04 and it's gimp starts for 14 seconds.
After the first run (where it has to evaluate plugins etc) it starts in under 4s on 26.04 on my Lenovo P53 (laptop from 2019). Which is admittedly not exactly snappy, but it's OK IMO.
Is the Ubuntu version of GIMP distributed as a snap package? I've had horrible performance with snap apps.
It's lovely to see such a positive changelog combining the efforts of multiple foss developers, some of which are brand new contributors fixing bugs. Especially in this dark age of opensource closing contributions to defend against endless AI slop committers.
> The new project file format will follow a more common “zipped XML” structure. While the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole thing each time.
How even you do that without file fragmentation, zip doesn't exactly have defragment without complete file rewrite. Feels like if they want to have incremental changes SQLite would be better option as you can just VACUUM while file is not being accessed
We didn't go into this in the news post since it was a quick overview, but GIMP uses GEGL for its main color and pixel engine. GEGL has a feature where you can automatically sync data between "buffers" in memory and in file - so as you're editing the image/layer/etc in GIMP, the buffers in the new format will automatically auto-save the data from the canvas.
It's still in-progress, so we'll have more technical details in the 3.3.2 release news.
Yeah I'd also be worried about leaving invisible data in the file that the user has removed from the project.
They should make it easy to install and use GenAI plugins (without messing with GPU drivers, etc.)
Zipped XML sounds like a bad idea. It's slow and bad. I say XCF forever.
SQLite would have been a lot better choice, in my opinion.
Pardon my ignorance about formats, but between XML & JSON, what would have made them choose XML? As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards & existing software examples around JSON for project & records management (e.g. VSCode's records as settings.json for example). Wasn't XML spearheaded by Microsoft but mostly used by Microsoft today?
json's only advantage is it's easier to write by hand, but that's not really a consideration here. XML has schema support and much more tooling available.
> much more tooling available
Most of which is barely maintained and low quality.
For example, just recently:
https://linuxiac.com/libxml2-becomes-officially-unmaintained...
But even before it became officially unmaintained, it was already quite unloved, and it's one of the most used xml library.
We are not in the peak Java/J2EE era anymore. Pretty much nobody is going to willingly work on the foundations unless they're getting paid because the majority absolutely loathes XML and would not see maintaining XML libs as fun, and guess what, they're not? xslt also got removed from web browsers because nobody wants to maintain those libraries. And corporations like Google don't want to pay a dev for those either.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-x...
Meanwhile the tooling around JSON is as healthy as it's ever been, with very efficient implementations in most common programming languages and multiple SIMD impls in C, C++, Rust etc. People actually want to work on this.
> As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards & existing software examples around JSON for project & records management
I don't understand why that is relevant; as long as there is a minimum level of tooling, libraries and support for their choice, what benefit would JSON bring over XML? I don't see a clear reason for one over the other.
Honestly, I'd have the same question if they chose JSON and someone asked why did they choose JSON over XML - Why wouldn't they?
JSON made me not hate XML. YAML made me not hate JSON.
> It's slow and bad.
Seems to have been working great for MS Office.
“Great”.
No offence to anyone, but I would not consider the performance of MS office to be great.
I guess it's comparative, but then I compare to its previous editions which used a sliver of the resources to accomplish 95% of what modern o365 does.
> previous editions... used a sliver of the resources
Well of course, but given that the previously employed technique was blitting, fliedumping memory areas, you can't be more efficient than that. Using XML is for transparency (readability).
(And, note, in context, I regard the ms office file format as lousy. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice format is good.)
I don't think your parent comment was talking about the resources involved in saving a file, but rather the resources involved in running the software.
Thank you, probably so, but in that case I cannot see how said comment is consistent in the branch ("about file formats") - I do not get how it would follow.
Its very widely used. Perfomrance might not be great, but adoption is.
Office documents since the 2007 have used a zipped XML approach. Just take an .docx and open it in 7zip.
EDIT: Narrowed the date.
I’m aware. IIRC this was a response to Microsoft being forced to use some “open” protocol or something.
> For instance, we’re quite proud that a XCF file made by a small company for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP
How do they pronounce “XCF” such that it’s “a XCF file” and not “an XCF file”? “Xeceff”?
To be honest, I didn't think about it too hard - I just wrote "a XCF" because it doesn't start with a vowel. I don't think it's worth submitting an edit for, but you're welcome to consider it "an XCF".
A "ksceef"?
But yeah, in my mind, it's always been "ex see eff", so an XCF.
I find some word processors don't test for vowel sound, and only adhere to the actual vowel letter.
In my mind it’s similar to exif
The beginning of “XCF” sounds similar to the beginning of “Exit”.
With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.
> With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.
I know, hence my question about the pronunciation. If I had thought the spelling was more important, the “X” would have settled it so I wouldn’t have asked.
You say "a exit"?
I thought every developer of this moved to the Glimpse fork
That effort didn't last long. I think this is the first I've heard about it since inception, the repo (assuming this is the right one, https://github.com/joshgiesbrecht/Glimpse, it was the only GIMP related thing that came up amongst a sea of unrelated projects with the same name) is hasn't seen a commit in 7 years and what appears to be the official site away from a forge (https://getglimpse.app/about/) is currently unresponsive.