> To celebrate [...] this nice birthday illustration (fully drawn within GIMP [...]
There's some sort of weird inferiority complex when your graphics software is 27 years old and you're still saying 'look we used it for one of our website assets.' It's like telling people at the birthday party that you dressed yourself.
I find it equally strange that there are almost no screenshots on the website, outside of the docs and tutorial section, and those tend to be partial screenshots for highly specific exemplar purposes. There are good screenshots in the Release Notes, but that's not somewhere new users are likely to head to immediately. The landing page declares it's great for 'High Quality Photo Manipulation, Original Artwork Creation, Graphic Design Elements, Programming Algorithms' - but none of these categories lead to their own pages full of compelling examples.
I get that GIMPists are very proud of how community-driven it is, but the quality is extremely variable to the point of weakening the project. Having good politics/aspirations is very important, but before you can turn people into contributors you need to turn them into enthusiastic users. GIMP could learn a bit from the commercial products it competes with about how to present itself to the rest of the world.
Are they the ones with a weird complex, or are you? Your post suggests that you feel like GIMP has something to prove much more than the four word throwaway line you're criticizing to me.
This is literally ht e opposite of what I was saying. I am not a fan of Gimp but nor am I an anti-fan, it seems very capable if that's what you like. My point is that the website does a very poor job of selling the tool to potential users.
Nah, it's them. The drawing in the blogpost just looks bad compared to what you can do in Krita.
Anyone aware of GIMP's history can figure out why the project goes in circles. History like how their developers "accidentally" deleted their entire roadmap a few months ago.
There used to be a site dedicated to script-fu which is a scheme like language.
There used to be a registry of scripts, due to the following it was taken down:
> The main problem was maintenance. Every version of gimp more or less required an update of plugin. People would write their plugin, upload it and probably never updated because it was a one off for them.
> Then there was something like X-thousand plugins.
> And then hackers got into it and vandalised the site.
I get why people take issue with GIMP, but I'm glad that it exists and has existed. Back in the day I got a lot done with GIMP for both fun and school work, and it was great that it worked both on Windows and Linux. Better tools are around now, and GIMP has failed to live up to a lot of its promises, but I don't get why people need to shit all over it. No one is making you use GIMP. It's honestly amazing that people can even come close to making this kind of software as FOSS and keep it going for this long.
What frustrates me is that it somehow sucks all the oxygen away from e.g. Krita, which is better in all the ways that matter. And frankly most of the whole Gtk/Gnome umbrella is like that. I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating.
I've never looked at Krita because it's always been referenced to me as a painting application primarily and not an image editing / photo manipulation tool. I understand there may be some cross over in functionality, but aren't they essentially built for different purposes?
I don't know; a lot of people say something like that but they never seem to give a concrete example of what the different things they need are. Krita has always been able to do all the photo editing I ever wanted to.
I think people just feel that the software is not for them. Krita always markets itself as a painting tool for artists, never mentioning image editing. For example, take the first paragraph that you can come across their website:
"Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
- concept art
- texture and matte painters
- illustrations and comics"
I'm not in the business of either, so why would I get the idea of installing it?
Looking into it, Krita does seem very capable. I don't think we should really be mad at healthy competition existing in these spaces though, they should lead to better tools for end users.
Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive.
I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc).
Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to be good.
This makes successful Open Source software like Blender or Firefox or Linux all the more impressive.
This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular.
There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that they became largely adopted: the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, X.org, etc. But for many others, too many wars have really caused the whole Linux-on-the-desktop dream to not be achieved to the level people hoped. GIMP is one of them, but the Gnome/KDE debacle is probably the biggest.
It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.
You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected, I'm not likely to invest hobby / recreational development time in any other aspect of that project. (That's not meant as a criticism of the hypothetical project leads - merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living, the bar is raised massively in terms of how much a developer needs to "believe" in the project and the direction it's taking.)
>It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.
There's nothing "ironic" about it at all. For many, many years, X.org was the only real display server that anyone used, after they all abandoned XFree86 for good reason. Wayland didn't come about until later, and even then, *it was made by the same people*. It was never a competing project.
>if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected
This is understandable, but frequently not the case. The KDE/Gnome fiasco, for instance, all started because of an argument about a license.
>merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living
Here again, it's frequently not the case. In the KDE/Gnome fiasco, many of the devs there were employed full-time by companies like RedHat to work on it. So it was really political.
You say that as if people would be working on the same project otherwise. Guaranteed if they aren't able to work on their competing project in the name of "solidarity", they probably wouldn't work on the other project instead. There are too many social and cultural barriers to being able to enact change in existing projects, which is why competing projects exist. People have different priorities, values, preferences, etc. You're never going to be able to unify all of that to the satisfaction of everybody involved and it would just lead to way too much strife and politics. Way less would get done.
I hate Gnome, but I know people like it. I'm happy that both KDE and Gnome exist, because it also means the people who made the decisions about Gnome's direction won't be making those same decisions about KDE.
There were no social or cultural barriers when the KDE/Gnome war started. It was entirely over a licensing issue. Other than that, the two projects were largely very similar, except that Gnome insisted on using C instead of C++ (and then replicating all of C++'s features in C). It wasn't until later that the two really diverged, with KDE having the "make it as configurable as possible" philosophy and Gnome having the "we're UI experts and know what's best for you little users" philosophy, borrowed from Apple but without the well-funded team of real UI researchers.
Anyway, even with the different philosophy towards users, that could have been done in a single project (i.e., Gnome3 can be a KDE skin), or two closely-related projects (i.e., Gnome3 is a fork of Plasma but otherwise shares the same libraries), reducing a lot of duplicated effort. Instead, we now have 6 or more different desktop environments for Linux and potential new users look at the mess and ask, "WTF?". Or they try one and hate it, and when they ask how to switch to a different one to try it out, the answer is "reformat your hard drive and install this other distro that actually cares about that DE", or "follow this list of command-line instructions and hope it doesn't break because your distro doesn't care about supporting that DE".
Only if better tools are actually getting into users' hands though. I don't know what exactly has gone wrong, but somehow it's the Gimp that keeps getting recommended to those end users.
Yeah, I think this is a good point. GIMP has been a default app on so many distros for so many years (to say nothing of existing on virtually every copy pasta “best FOSS/Linux/Free apps list” that lazy SEO bloggers (and now YouTubers) have been making for decades), it’s become just one of those defacto apps that gets all the attention/is the go-to suggestion, even though it isn’t the best option for a lot of people.
And that would be fine if there was a robust community around the project, but there isn’t? Like, I’m not blaming the few maintainers and I’m not blaming the dwindling third party community at all. But I am going to be critical of the distros that continue to install it by default (Ubuntu dropped it as a default many years back IIRC, but Debian and Fedora still include it) and the people that just parrot it as what new users should use, even tho the most fervent defenders admit it is not at all competitive with what you need in an image editing tool in 2022.
Edit: turns out Ubuntu dropped GIMP as a default app in 2009 and someone that seems like yesterday. Changed that sentence accordingly.
Krita was initially release as a painting program rather than a photo editing program and that was where most of the initial 'advertising' was focused. Also looking at their home page the first thing you see is a screen shot of a digital painting and the words
"Krita is the full-featured digital art studio.
It is perfect for sketching and painting, and presents an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters."
So it is not at all clear to most people that it is a tool that can also be used for photo editing.
> I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating
That's some weird complex. I doubt most people know what piece of free software is European versus American. I further doubt it has any meaningful impact on adoption.
Mint I'll grant, though I always thought of it as a thin fork of Ubuntu. Interestingly the first version was based on Kubuntu - I wonder what motivated them to change, but the old release notes appear to have disappeared.
It is undeniable that corporate Linux has prefered GNOME over Plasma, I can't name you a single relevant European distro that uses Plasma as its default.
- Canonical (United Kingdom) ships GNOME for Ubuntu.
- SUSE (Germany) ships GNOME as default on their SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE hsa no defaults.
- Manjaro (Austria, France, Germany according to DistroWatch) ships XFCE (GTK based) by default.
- Mint (Ireland) ships 3 GTK desktops, defaulting to Cinnamon.
Meanwhile, on America:
- Valve (USA) ships Plasma on SteamOS for their desktop experience.
- System76 (USA) ships (although they hate it) GNOME for PopOS. They want to replace it with a Rust-based, GTK/Qt-free alternative.
- Red Hat (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop for RHEL.
- Fedora (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop.
So I don't think country impacts much, it is just that GTK is the de facto toolkit for Linux and historically, Qt wasn't FOSS and GNOME received a lot of development for accessibility during Sun's days, which matters a lot for corporate due to stricter requirements on that front.
Social graph? Americans tend to know other Americans, Europeans other Europeans, on account of geographic and political proximity. Possibly the divide is a symptom of the underlying communication network.
I think it was more about companies than individuals. European companies (e.g. SUSE, Mandrake) defaulted to KDE, whilst US companies (e.g. Red Hat, Novell) to GNOME.
I don't know why. Maybe it was RMS who pushed for GNOME as back then Qt wasn't free software (as in FSF or OSI approved license). Maybe it was that KDE started in Europe and later GNOME in the US to provide an alternative to the “non-free” KDE.
This caused European funding (from companies and institutions) to go to KDE, and US funding to go to GNOME, thus creating the communities and ecosystems we have today.
Another point for GNOME back in the day for companies, was that it was (could be?) more locked than KDE and it had less customization options. These are desirable traits if you want to install it to your company's workstations, so maybe it made sense for Red Hat to adopt GNOME.
The key point in time where GNOME became way more popular, was when Ubuntu came out with GNOME as the default desktop. A smaller point was when Novell bought SUSE, so SUSE switched to GNOME, leaving almost no commercial distros that default to KDE.
All in all, it doesn't matter much anymore. Our life and workloads have moved to the cloud and locked down devices, thus limiting the surface area of desktop environments and their ecosystem.
Prominent self-ad/sponsor banners/5 star testimonials adding to scam feeling.
It seems less prominent now but I remember that it previously had some vaguely NSFWish animeish art on website. And startup screen has some disfigured cross of human and bunny(?) what for me is worse than "Gimp" as name.
It's not sucking all the oxygen from Krita. Those who want to hack on gimp and those who want to hack on Krita will either hack on both, or largely don't exist.
If you are infuriated by a project that has been around longer than Krita, then I think you need to seriously reconsider what makes you mad.
I think GIMP is still pretty important because it at least gave you options over buying or pirating Photoshop. Nowadays, I use Affinity Photo over any of them, but the importance of choice matters, because piracy doesn't impact Adobe's reach. It further entrenches it as the norm.
Today, with Krita, Affinity, Pixelmator and the like, I would never suggest its "morally right" to pirate Photoshop, because you will still inadvertently support an Adobe monoculture. The morally right choice is to use anything else, and the competitors are functionally capable of supporting 95% of Photoshop's features.
Also, GIMP did give us GTK, which solved a very real issue with open source desktops -- none of them were actually open source at the time. Gnome still conducts the very important work of supporting GTK.
GIMP has always claimed to be a replacement for Photoshop, and has always failed to live up to that claim when I've tried it.
After being lied to, I'm not eager to try again and see if I'll be lied to again. I'll just use Photoshop because it has always worked where GIMP never has.
If GIMP has truly, finally achieved their stated claims of replacing Photoshop (presumably through feature parity), then I'm glad to hear it for all those still willing to try it, but I've no interest in wasting any more of my time verifying that claim than I already have in the past.
Except that GIMP never has claimed that. Sure, some users of GIMP have made that claim, and many reviews in magazines (back when those still existed) and on website have made that claim, but the GIMP people have always made clear that they are making their own thing, not an X-replacement.
Eventual CMYK support was announced back when I had hair. Today I'm pretty sure that CMYK still isn't supported, though I think there might have been some recent advances in that area. Non-destructive editing was supposed to also become a thing with GEGL, but that never really materialized.
I have a 2 year old desktop apple computer and GIMP gets about 2 fps for simple tasks like using the pencil to draw. (maybe it's better on linux or PC)
GIMP is the only image program I have seen on Linux that shows a preview when printing, and it lets the user freely scale the image to get the desired size on paper.
Not if those features don't provide value. Just having a feature isn't necessarily a benefit if that feature doesn't work, or doesn't work well, or leaves the user frustrated.
I use GIMP as a software engineer in game development for modifying assets created by artists. My workflow is typically cropping / resizing, merging images, repositioning, running batch scripts, etc. I never touch a paint brush, but do all sorts of other modifications.
GIMP is perfect for my workflow. Simple tasks like resizing selected regions is a chore with Krita. And did I mention that GIMP is scriptable? I've been using GIMP professionally since 2008.
EDIT: I tried the heal tool, it's pretty shit :( Seems to clone random parts which kind of fit, but the tool edges are always visible. Resynthesizer for GIMP works much better (and Adobe's stuff works very well of course).
"You know what? I would steal a car. If it was as easy as, like, touching the car and then 30 seconds later I own the car. And like, I would steal a car if by stealing the car, the person who owned the car they got to keep the car. And uh, I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives." -- Mindy Kaling
I had no idea who this person was so I searched her name. Apparently she grew up in Massachusetts, went to elite private schools, and became a Hollywood actress and writer. Somehow I have a hard time believing she had to pirate Photoshop just to barely scrape by at any point in her life.
In addition to being an actress and a writer, she's also a comedian.
This is likely a joke making fun of a time when companies wanted to enforce draconian and disproportionate punishments for doing something fairly mundane.
As an engineer who grew up having to hone my skills using questionable software, I support this joke.
If you're focusing on her background; you're focusing on the wrong thing.
She didn't say she had to, or even that she did. She's just arguing that the analogy between software piracy and auto theft is specious, and she's right.
She also works for media studios who would see themselves as the poor victims of digital piracy. Instead of dismissing her viewpoint based on her status, maybe try addressing the point that stealing a car is actually not at all the same as copying software or digital media, and arguments that they really are equivalent miss the point and lead to pretty dumb laws.
Her most famous role was on The Office, which constituted a significant portion of Netflix's bandwidth (7% is one hand-wavy estimate based on related data), and Netflix has been estimated to have been an even more significant portion of worldwide Internet traffic (25% - 35% in some data). They're hand-wavy numbers but I would be confident that the show Mindy Kaling is best known for having written and acted in has easily made up over 1-2% of global Internet traffic at times. I wouldn't say she's entirely divorced from the issue of digital media piracy.
Also it's from a stand up comedy routine. It's okay to laugh in life.
I remember I was in college and excited when I heard about GIMP. I had been running Linux for a year and wanted a photo editor but GIMP was written for the Motif GUI toolkit which was shipped with commercial Unix systems (Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, IBM) but on Linux it cost extra.
One of our campus sysadmins had the Linux Motif libraries and compiled GIMP and distributed static binaries to us.
There was an effort by "The Hungry Programmers" to develop LessTif as an open source Motif clone. You can see a reference to it in these old GIMP site from November 1995.
Motif 1.2 or above is required. (Ack! This restriction will be removed when LessTif becomes usable).
GIMP is great for what it is. As a dev I use it frequently to do minor adjustments to images and photographs; cropping, colors, brightness, resizing, rotation etc.
Right after Inkscape, GIMP is probably my second favorite "I'm actually a bit of a designer myself"-tool. Both do more than enough - again and again - for me to not need outside help, they no doubt give me an edge!
For those - probably designers - in need of more features, just go ahead and pay for it! There's no reason to mock GIMP for not matching the features of Photoshop.
Personally I have no gripes with GIMP, it IS great it’s there, but when I look at recent FOSS projects I enjoy like Blender, Godot, Kdenlive… I can’t help that GIMP could be a lot more successful in building an active ecosystem of sprawling development that inspires. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad people like it as it is. But I see a lot of missed opportunities. When I used GIMP and wanted to contribute back, there was a lot of derogatory attitudes I noticed (this is 10 years ago now or so, maybe it has changed)
In a comment above, CMYK support has just been added. That’s pretty late for an image editor that exists for so long. I am just irked by what could have been under more open and inviting management.
I've been using GIMP for over a decade for a good chunk of my image manipulation needs, from quickly cropping screenshots, creating the occasional image macro, prototyping logos before opening Inkscape and editing pictures to creating whacky abstract stuff[1].
Thanks! In a way it's a mix of generative and manual art, I guess. It starts with gradients or noise. Afterwards it's layers upon layers of color mapping, filters, distortion, more noise, more gradients, etc. - Basically creating artifacts from lossy transforms/mappings/distorts/layer modes and then building those up again into an image. Rinse and repeat.
Some examples of things I made use of:
Colors > Levels. Mostly to get noise to go across the whole range from black to white, not just some in-between. Multiple iterations of reducing the output levels and then stretching those out to the full range again can create interesting artifacts.
Colors > Curves. Same as above, and also final processing. I used a fixed set of gradients (UIGradients) and usually changed them up.
Colors > Map > Gradient Map. Combining the above with gradient mapping, or combining it with noise can result in interesting artifacts as well.
Colors > Desaturate > Color To Gray. Adds grain, texture and contrast around edges. Lots you can do with that, especially by distorting the result.
Filters > Distorts > Kaleidoscope, Filters > Map > Panorama Projection, Filter > Map > Paper Tile. With the exception of the galaxy one, all the ones in the album are somehow the result of those.
I did most of these in 2019 when I was deeply burned out, and clicking around for hours was all I was able to do. It really was kind of therapeutic.
Still no adjustment layers, still no layer styles.
It’s so easy to just critique away…but really? Really? Those are just absolutely essential image editing software features. What have they been prioritizing ahead of that?
"Øyvind Kolås raises funds for his work on GEGL, GIMP’s new sophisticated image processing core. This work is crucial to implement features such as non-destructive editing in GIMP, including features known as adjustment layers and layer effects in similar software. Øyvind is the GEGL maintainer and its primary developer who has been working on it since mid-2000s.
"
At this point I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this project existing has harmed creative tools on Linux.
If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features.
Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
Who knows why you're being downvoted, and I'd say it's _more_ well known than GIMP.
My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.
Haven't used photoshop in 10 years. I have gimp, never use it. Paint.net is my basic image tool, along with IrfanView, for which I have a license circa 2004. I also use Scribus, FOSS version of InDesign.
But never heard of Photopea until today...
> I am confused why you think that Gimp somehow magically used all slots for image software development.
The linux distribution model seems to lead it to, somehow. If you open up a RedHat machine and ask it for a picture editor, you're going to get Gimp, even though Krita would almost certainly be better at doing what you want.
Krita has those features. Sure it would probably be better if more people worked on Krita, but I'm often pleasantly surprised by the new features they implement.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that gimp is made by adobe or microsoft, to sabotage open source alternatives entirely. Even starving kids in Africa will save up for photoshop and windows, once they have used gimp. Literally every alternative is better than gimp.
Not anyone who needs to edit images in a professional sense. They arrive, try GIMP because they’re told it’s a Photoshop alternative then leave when they see the lack of normal features.
It’s actually even bad for students because to create with GIMP you have to do early 90s image editing workflows which are no longer used in real jobs.
A lot of people including me from time to time do need to deal with some image editing at work and do not need Photoshop (nor have I ever used Photoshop) and GIMP's powerful tools more than fill this need.
Those could had been implemented loooooooong ago. In a hacky way. The dictate was to be pure and wait for GEGL. So still nothing of that. We got layer trees at least.
They could have been implemented by overloading the layer blending code, and recoded with GEGL once ready. But pure won over "we can do that too now, please do not look behind the curtain". It's really simple: adjustment is just a layer that only uses mask data and operates on the bottom layer pixels with already coded functions (levels, contrast, etc). Styles would be similar, applying plugins/scripts. If when proposed the reply is "we will not accept that kind of crude system", nobody wastes time coding a patch.
That was not the only time GIMP project went the pure road. There was also drama with themes and paintbrush system. On the end, some of the old ideas managed to get there, like grey icon theme (now hated by some, the irony) or having a working paint system (I have not tested with a tablet, so no idea if any good). Even non coders were trying to help, for example contributing brushes and testing the system [0], yet they ran out of steam after some time of hitting walls. The few people involved now seem to be the ones that have been taking over after all the previous got seriously burnt (except Kolås).
[0] https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-pre... (autotranslation work OKish)
Gnome integration and Wayland as far as I can tell from its roadmap. So basically staying functional under the ADHD driven development model that is the Linux desktop environment. A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.
> A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.
Yet not terribly surprising. GIMP provided a useful alternative widget framework because it helped them push boundaries. Now that's grown into its own thing, and the parent project lags since its core focus is elsewhere.
No, those are absolutely essential Adobe Photoshop features. Having a different set of tools to accomplish a specific goal is fine because, bear with me, GIMP is not Photoshop.
90% of the complaining that always happens in these threads is Photoshop/Irfanview/whatever users, coming in and assuming that the purpose of GIMP is to reimplement your favorite image editing software for free. That is not the goal, and it never has been. As long as you keep pretending anyone intends GIMP to be a Photoshop clone, you'll keep being disappointed.
After _three decades_ I can no longer blame anyone but the complainant.
That's evident. I've used the tool periodically and I can't think of anything that's improved in the last 10 years. I think it actually got worse when they made all the icons greyscale and hid some under others. You still have 3 different tools for moving, resizing, and rotating when every other program has them all in one.
It's disappointed me as well over the past 5-10 years. The switch from save->export seemed arbitrary and pointless. And the last time I tried putting text into an image with their text editing tool, the widget was so buggy I gave up - and that was in a release that shipped in debian stable at the time.
But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talking shit like they didn't get their refund.
Oh that particular change drives me crazy. It's not the switch per se, it's the lecture I receive when I slip up and use the muscle-memory procedure of File->Save As with a .tif extension, like I did for the first decade of using GIMP. The software has quite clearly identified what I'm trying to do, so refusing to comply and forcing me to jump through an arbitrary hoop is akin to jeering the words "You didn't say 'Simon Says'"!
The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original.
It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.)
[For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]
They've been working on this for like a decade, in a sense. They're rewriting the core as a library, GEGL, which supports non-destructive editing as well as other long-requested features. My impression is GEGL is largely done; the remaining work is to port GIMP to it. Realizing these gains for non-destructive editing is planned for v3.2, which is probably years away still. The other major initiative since forever has been porting to GTK 3.
Yes, which means GTK3 is finally a stable target! ;)
I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!
For instance - in Photoshop, one can add an adjustment layer on a picture that alters the saturation and color balance of that image. One can then copy that layer for use later, or edit that layer on the fly if one decides it's not right. Or delete it entirely, much later in the editing process.
Everything, subjectively. Logic Pro is the epitome of Apple leaning fully into 'Form as an excuse for function' and it's one of the most hilariously useless pieces of paid software ever devised. Apple refuses to give it Pro Tools functionality because it's not a 'real DAW' and hobbles multiple features to Garageband-level functionality.
I'd prefer to keep my ugly-but-capable GIMP on every platform rather than having a single half-decent MacOS version that bends over backwards to foreign HID.
Does it mean that to use a tool you must be capable of building it?
Does it mean that to share criticism you must be able to build it? I’m thinking about applying this logic to the rest of life and it’s rather amusing to imagine the silence. Hmm, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
I think one could more fairly say, “offer up money for someone to build the features you need” but I think that’s also a very difficult proposition given the logistics of the matter.
> Does it mean that to share criticism you must be able to build it?
No. I've reported a lot of tickets/feature requests for a lot of projects that seemed to be taken good.
But criticism that seems entitled is rarely appreciated, and surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive neither.
There is a shitload of other missing features OP could have mentioned on this anniversary post and I guess it can feel a bit depressing too. "27 years! Happy birthday! Still no job though?". Eeh.
You can express constructive criticism with some humility.
"It's a shame nobody has been able to work on adjustment layers and layer styles, which are important features in such a piece of software."
OP did not feel entitled to me, but I can understand who their message could have been taken somewhat badly.
I appreciate what you’re saying. Do you mind if I dig into something a wee bit? Because us engineering types are often a bit communicatively tone deaf.
What specifically in the comment suggests a sense of entitlement? For me, I see none. I see a, “as an expert user, it’s surprising that such an important feature has been missing forever and I would like to criticize that.”
Edit: I’m not allowed to reply to your response but thank you for taking the time to respond.
Whoops, I edited to state that OP didn't feel entitled to me in the meantime. Sorry for this. It's more the "surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive" part. To be clear, I'm almost 100% sure the OP comment was written with good intent.
I don't work on the Gimp, I've read developers working on it at length, I think as a developer reading this comment I would be thinking "Well, we do what we can". Jehan, who wrote the post, contributes to the Gimp thanks to donations to his Ze Marmot project, his team cannot pay itself very well. They are going out of their way improving the Gimp anyway, indeed prioritizing features they need the most most certainly. But you can do only so much.
It might just be a matter of form/formulation. But it matters, because people won't take the time analyzing a comment for several minutes to completely put themselves in the commenter's shoes.
edit: you can respond by clicking on the "X minutes ago" link I think, but I saw your edit :-)
It was a suggestion, another suggestion is to fund gimp development. Another one is to move to a different tool. But to question on what is talking their time for my feature x to get complete is really not a polite way of discord on Open Source software.
The tool is free, so you are free to use it, and you are free not to. That is up to you. If you want a feature, please support the development woth either you cash or skill. Its that simple.
Unless you are ideologically inclined, it would be a better use of your resources to just pay for photoshop. As much as it angers people on this website, the subscription model provides a constant stream of funding that has gone in to keeping the tool the best on the market and for anyone using it professionally, it delivers far more value than it's cost.
I bought Pixelmator Pro for that reason. It's smaller than PS, it has great usability, no cloud-based subscription model and it's not Adobe but a small indie company.
This attitude is why no one seriously suggests GIMP over Photoshop.
Why would anyone with the talent required to do that invest time in a project that hasn’t been able to add these basic features.
Cloning the current GIMP feature set into a modern and competent system is easier than trying to work with the team that can’t ship these features alone.
Congrats Gimp! I imagine your devs come over here to read sometimes.
You've provided a solid picture editor for in-a-pinch and free-out-of-the-box usage; and, while I've since moved on to usually use paid tools like ProCreate and Affinity's software, you have facilitated by artistic work for decades!
It seems for years in every thread about Gimp I've seen, people are shitting on it. I don't get it. I suppose that it's from people comparing it to Photoshop? I've never been a heavy Photoshop user though, and Gimp has been perfect for all my basic non-pro-level needs over the years. I'm sure this is true for many others as well.
Just wanted to say thank you to the devs in case you are here.
> It seems for years in every thread about Gimp I've seen, people are shitting on it.
What is hard to understand? Gimp promised since ages CMYK editing or non-destructive overlays, nothing materialized or as a shit-show (CMYK can be exported but not edited)
If no criticism of the product is allowed because "It's FREE," then why post anything about it? Why be proud of existing for 27 years if its best or only feature is "It's FREE?"
"I don't understand why people don't like it."
"It sucks in these specific ways."
"It's FREE."
Literal feces is free also, but most people aren't excited to receive it as a gift.
GIMP is considerably better than literal feces, but there are alternatives to GIMP in both FOSS and no-cost web-based form that are objectively better and also free, and have taken less than 27 years to get where they are.
I having a masters in Computer Science could never make my way through GIMP, tried quite a few times. I have never seen a more complicated UI (while I was at least functional in Photoshop). Thankfully hundreds of online image editors arrived in last few years that did precisely what I wanted in a much easier way.
I recently made the move to Affinity Photo. The latest version gives me all I need. Muscle memory is still with Potatoshop, but I’m slowly transferring.
I recently dropped the expensive-as-hell Illustrator license for Affinity's vector drawing program, Affinity Designer, for when I need to slop together SVGs (which isn't that often), and I've been pretty happy with it so far. I've already got Acorn for my bitmap needs but I will definitely consider Photo if/when it's time to change. I would definitely suggest people fed up with Adobe's pricing schemes and awful UIs to give Affinity's products a look.
I have been contemplating this move as well and nearly bought the whole Serif package on sale but I am Adobe's bitch and getting too old not to just pay for the problem to go away.
I will say, the Affinity Suite (which just got a great 2.0 update) is excellent. I still use Creative Cloud because work pays for it, but I finally canceled my personal subscription and I just use Affinity or Acorn when I need to do something quick and dirty.
An advantage I will say is that if you have more than two machines, Affinity doesn’t make you do the license login song and dance. Because I am frequently using at least 3 computers (and often it’s 5), I like that I don’t even have to have Creative Cloud installed on everything, because it’s just easier that way.
For me, Adobe is still better in some ways/more familiar, but Affinity is getting so close that I’m very happy we have this sort of tool as an alternative.
There's an instinct for pre-emptive attacks on minority opinions from people who have gone with the crowd and experience some cognitive dissonance over it. There are a lot of people who think that they should be using the GIMP (for whatever reason), but of course found it easier to do what everyone else was doing, and have to justify that by attacking the software and the people who use it.
The reason definitely isn't because Photoshop is a great piece of software with a logical UI, because it's damn near a random UI filled with aging cruft, advertisements, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for Photoshop is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.
If the GIMP had proper color management (and better non-destructive editing), I'd never touch Photoshop. That's the beauty of free software, though. Once that stuff is finalized and in, we'll have it forever. See, GIMP doesn't have the means to steal colors from work you've already done, and you don't have to rent it.
>See, GIMP doesn't have the means to steal colors from work you've already done, and you don't have to rent it.
Yeah, because with GIMP, you can't use Pantone colors to begin with :)
I like and use GIMP, but the color issue is a misrepresentation. Mainly because I don't imagine that 99% of the Photoshop users ever touched the Pantone stuff.
There’s also an instinct for preemptively defending and discarding any piece of criticism and attacking those with criticisms (no matter what it is) of being invalid.
The reason definitely isn’t because GIMP is a great piece of software with a logical UI, near a random UI filled with aging cruft, tutorials from 2004, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for the GIMP is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.
--
Look, I respect and am appreciative of the work the GIMP team and community does. It's impressive and I've donated to them over the years, even though I have never enjoyed using the software. And Photoshop these days is often a mess, I'm not defending that.
But it is possible to appreciate that the GIMP exists and also be critical of its abysmal usability and the fact that it pales in comparison to not just other proprietary (but extremely affordable tools like Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Acorn), but also other FOSS tools like Krita, Blender, and Inkscape, to say nothing of near-OSS tools like the excellent Paint.net. Some of this is down to the fact that making good software is hard, especially free software. But a lot of it comes down to a lack of solid direction and and insistence from the crowd that GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop. It isn't. It never will be.
I'm glad the GIMP exists. You also couldn't pay me to use the GIMP.
I wasn’t shitting on them. I was making fun of the poster above who used that language to dismiss anyone who doesn’t want to say glowing things about a piece of software.
Gimp team members, especially the person in charge of their publicity efforts, were notorious for finding any and all discussions about GIMP on the internet and telling people to go **** themselves should any improvements be suggested or any criticism uttered. Have you tried to raise a bug for them? I did and I saw dozens of others do it, only to end up lectured about how much of a deficient human beings we were for not getting the greatness of GIMP.
They have run a UX brainstorm and then threw out all of the input that has been provided to them in good faith by hundreds of people.
Than there's the case of team's stubborn insistence on not changing the name.
GIMP team has been an active participant in the state of affairs that leads to threads like these.
I don’t see all that much vitriol. I do see a lot of people who honestly don’t think the GIMP is very good, and that better (free and open source) alternatives exist. That’s not in and of itself vitriol.
I think some of us can be unduly sensitive to criticism of the GIMP, because it’s a long standing project we have all used at one time or another and may have fond memories of. But it’s no longer the only kid on the block, and it’s just not holding its own against new free projects. It’s mediocre, and it could be better. We’re not doing it any favours by refraining from fair critique.
Yeah, it really bummed me out too. People don't remember when there was literally nothing and having this free photo editor was a life saver. They also don't know how stupidly complex that kind of software is to write.
Just a lot of sneering, and not from anyone whose done anything worth a damn based on a cursory examination of their accounts.
I was hoping to read a ton of posts about good memories, or thanks, to the project but I wish I hadn't opened it now.
I dunno, I mean look what every GIMP alternative has achieved in a fraction of the timeframe.
Starting to think this “you should be happy and eat this rotten morsel because otherwise you’d have nothing” ideology is toxic and harms actual good technology being built.
Even the Blender team managed to drop the “submit a patch” attitude and actually turn one of the most convoluted pieces of creative software ever made into the defacto for the next generation through actually listening and responding to users.
Think of the good that could have been done in the software world if a different team with an attitude of building for their users had decided to build a free image editor 27 years ago.
Congrats to GIMP! As someone who could never afford photoshop, and never learned alternative software sourcing, gimp was wonderful for school projects and one off paying gigs. To this day I still use gimp for personal photo projects. Hope to one day be free to contribute.
For me GIMP has been infuriatingly good - by that I mean its 95% amazing and 5% complete and utter horseshit. Sadly I run into those 5% often.
GIMP has the signs of what I call "Brainworms" in a project. By that I mean conceptual-ideological stubbornness for certain things that harm the Workflow of most users. A minor example of this is the save / export thing where use of the XCF format is forced for some conceptual reason that just gets in the way for me every single time I use GIMP. I used the XCF format for one thing once last year for the first time so I guess I saved saved time there once. Can't say that about any other time i used GIMP tho.
The other more major example I can give falls under the "missing non destructive editing functions" that I have seen other comments mention. As part of my image "manipulation" I need to add several simple geometric shapes of the right size to an image (I think it was 2 lines and a rectangle). This is super hard to do in GIMP because while there are ways to draw a line and to do a rectangle as soon as you let go of your mouse button those are converted to bitmap right away. So no adjusting the position angle or line width of the lines or the dimensions of the rectangle. This can be partially worked around by using layers to position the lines and redoing the lines with different widths until they match the width and angle you need. You can apply rotations but that has its own difficulties since the aliasing of the lines then isn't what it should be. The easiest Solution here is to not use GIMP.
The apparent reason why GIMP has been missing these vector functions is that it was felt that vector functions would be "drawing" on not "manipulating" an image if a comment I read by a person involved with the project is to be believed. So GIDP not GIMP if you will. A great app becomes completely unable because of a single function.
GIMP is missing such basic, basic features and things, that I genuinely wonder what's going on with the development or how anyone uses it for anything other than basic editing. It's nice that it's free and open though I guess.
Adjustment layers / nondestructive editing, text and shape effects are huge productivity boosters. It's a pain going back to a world where they don't exist - and many hours of paid labor for the employer, or taken out of your life. Missing CYMK made GIMP a non-starter for people working in print. A nice healing tool exists, but it's a pain to install as it is a plugin, even on Linux I had to hunt for dependencies from different repos.
How "basic" are these is debatable though. They are very useful, and widely used, and multiple image tools support them, that's for sure.
For those used to PhotoShop who have a hard time transitioning, checkout PhotoGIMP [1]. No, it doesn't magically make GIMP as powerful as PhotoShop, but it rearranges the UI so that it's more familiar to users accustomed to PhotoShop. Frankly, I don't do very advanced image editing, so GIMP definitely has what I need, but I could never unlearn the tool placement of PhotoShop.
GIMP was the birth place of GTK, which was later renamed to GTK+ after it was rewritten to be object oriented. GNOME desktop environment still uses GTK+
GIMP is the only software whose UI makes me feel completely stupid. Every 1-2 years, I install it, fire it up to crop an image. I stare at the screen, right click a few times, then I close the app after admitting total defeat. It's been like this for 20 years.
A few years ago, I found out that Irfanview runs under Wine. It's a great feeling to understand the UI of a program.
I just categorically disagree that you can conclude anything about GIMP on this basis. I will strongly agree with anyone who says that GIMP is missing features and that it's subpar for graphic designer work. But I've used GIMP for over 15 years now and I have the exact same experience as you when I try to do anything in Photoshop. I simply can't find my way around Photoshop's interface at all. Does that mean that Photoshop's interface is terrible? No. It means I'm not used to it.
The crop tool is literally one click away in the GIMP interface, by the way, and once you activate it, it works like it does in any other program.
Just to give you a feedback from a new (neutral) user who had no experience of either image editing concepts and tricks; OR an image editing tool like Photoshop or GIMP. I could at least navigate my way through in Photoshop but never in GIMP in only a handful of times I have used both of these software in my life. GIMP was always the software that I wanted to love, but every time I uninstalled it after a few failed attempts.
I'm in the same boat, love gimp and use it all the time. Like any other non trivial software, it takes a bit of learning but it's funny to see a lot of vocal people on HN complaining how UI are now some dumb down and see in the case of gimp the wish to make it simpler, you can't please everyone
For me, it was just that I have been using Photoshop for years, and GIMP for 3 times max. I took the time once, and clicked through all of the menus, and settings, taking at least some seconds to read what they do. I think it took around two hours. After that, working with was much smoother. And now, when I sit back to Photoshop, I appreciate the adjustment layers and text effects, but I'm similarly confused about the UI as I was back then with GIMP. It really is just a matter of familiarity.
Running in the browser is a no-go for lots of organizations, and Gimp runs in portable mode for those that can't install anything on their workstation.
Yeah, it's not amazing, but Gimp is light years from Paint. Just removing background on stuff, crap like that, 80% of the graphics stuff people ask me for at work. It's not PS, it's not even Blender-levels of OSS, but it works alright.
Now, compositing and actual challenging graphical stuff, different story.
I said that as "it is way better despite having more limited resources". You can even download the files of photopea.com locally and use it offline but that wasn't my point.
Gimp would get more donations if they put more effort into making it approachable and accessible. It's a problem with community-driven projects in many contexts: it's so worthy that criticism is stifled, even where this would lead to improvement and needed growth in the community.
That’s an interesting perspective. Did GIMP get there first but just not patent the tech or it just makes it so that GIMP cannot replicate improvements?
Adobe Photoshop was originally written for the Apple Macintosh pre-OSX in the late 1980s, pre-dating GIMP massively. Large numbers of software patents soon followed. trivia- Microsoft Word was also written natively for the Mac OS -- it was many, many years before a graphical Microsoft version was available.
> After the first 7 000 hours of work (around 5 hours a day during 3.5 years), I haven't made a single dollar (it was just my hobby during the college).
3rd paragraph.
You can see what it looked like at that time by looking at the blog posts.
Then maybe point to the blog posts rather an AMA that clearly doesn't contradict anything that I said before stating "this is an obvious lie"? Yes, they worked on the project without making revenue initially. Was it that good then?
Dear Gimp developers, my walls are covered in photos printed with help from Gimp, making my home a little brighter wherever I look. Multiply that by half a bajillion users, and those lines of code you wrote have made a concrete difference to the world. Thank you for your service.
I was a heavy GIMP user back in the day. Just last week i downloaded again. I didn‘t understand anything. Maybe i just forgot it all, but it felt unusable to me.
The UI seemed so cluttered and unnecessarily complex. Almost like they want to prove how powerful the tool is, by shoving it all in your face. I didn‘t like it.
I think it might be time to reinvent. It would be a shame if GIMP joined the club of 27…
Then i might just have forgotten it (which i stated as a possibility). I haven‘t used it in at least 10-14 years (wow, i‘m still a noob in so many things after all this time in the matrix).
Back then i might have been more fascinated with the „FOSS alternative“ and more eager to learn… but even back then it has never felt intuitive.
Glad to hear people still enjoy & use GIMP.
I have never, and do not know anybody who has, avoided good software for something as stupidly trivial as its name. If the name were one of the more hardcore expletives I'd maybe think twice. As it stands, this one is fairly vanilla as far as problematic words go, is clearly typeset as an acronym, and is principally a reference to Pulp Fiction, therefore being at least one referential layer away from the original term. I would like to see statistics on who actually cares about this.
When I’m sitting down and teaching my kid how to edit a photo or sketch a drawing, do you honestly see me sitting them down to a GIMP session?
And when I’m not around, and they want to pull up their favourite drawing program, do you see them typing “gimp” into the search bar? Which - as of Windows 11 - now helpfully loads internet results and related ads?
Or do I just start them on Krita, a much more powerful and user friendly open source program, with significantly less risk of accidentally encountering the GIMP’s namesakes? Or me getting a call from my kid’s school to ask why my kid is talking about gimps?
No, you probably wouldn't teach your kid to use GIMP as a first image editor, just like you wouldn't teach them LaTeX as their first way to produce documents. I agree, Krita is better for new users.
Google "gimp" for me. What are the top results? What's highlighted in the sidebar? I don't see an issue. You have to scroll down a ways before you get to Urban Dictionary, I can't imagine a kid doing that instead of clicking the first result with the cute dog picture.
The school thing is the first actual problem. But then, it's an easy thing to clarify. I'm of the opinion that it's a good thing that their first experience of that word is an image editor, it detracts from the offensive meaning. The hope being that the offensive meaning will be relegated to an obscure footnote, the primary definition of the word to them being GIMP. We shouldn't give offensive words more power, we should diminish their power by using them in non-offensive contexts. See the adaptation of the word "cunt" in Australia.
If I google the word 'gimp' in a private browsing tab (so not logged in, no cookies, safe search on), I get these three links - with Google showing the article images! - in a news box after the third result:
Then there's the Urban Dictionary, as you mention. So yes, there's an issue.
> See the adaptation of the word "cunt" in Australia.
I'm Australian, so I understand pretty well how we use the word cunt. Contrary to popular perceptions, if you called someone a cunt at a work meeting, you'd probably be fired on the spot. Similarly, it would be... a career limiting move to pitch your supervisors on the idea of switching key business operations to a system called 'Cunt'.
Gimp is just not a good name. Context matters. I appreciate a bit of colour and character as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place, and 'the name of a major piece of free software' just ain't it.
I repeated your experiment and do not see the news box. I see those articles if I select the News tab. Otherwise the results match my findings. I'm willing to concede that those articles can show up to certain users, however they are definitely not the first results, which is important to note.
I am certainly less informed than yourself about the Australian lexicon. I was wrong to jump to the most widely recognized example and should have picked a different one which matched my point more closely, and one on which I was more informed.
My point was not that "cunt" is acceptable in businesses meetings, my point was that it was comparatively _more acceptable in common parlance_ than in other cultures. The message being that the words themselves are not innately offensive, but the meanings attached to them that can vary with time and context, and their impact can be lessened by repeat exposure in a non-offensive setting. I believe that is preferable to outright banning certain phonemes and maintaining their offensive power.
You can see this in action in our Google example - the image editor has the top results and the offensive term is in the newsbox (which we've proved is not universal), and lower down on the search page. The more popular the editor gets, the less prominent the other results are. I think that's a good thing.
I apologise - I double checked and I was wrong about the search results. I get those results on DuckDuckGo, not Google. Not great for DDG, but not the same as Google results.
I understand and appreciate your point, but I'm going to have to disagree with you that the goal - when naming software - is to rehabilitate words, and that of all words the word 'gimp' is in particular need of rehabilitation. Its main use today appears to be in the fetish community, and I'm absolutely fine with that! But it's not a good name or association for an unrelated image editor, in my mind.
I just don't think it is a good idea to put loaded language into people's Start bars, whatever the author's intention, when the people just want to use an image editor.
Non English speakers should have no such issue with the name and adoption in that population should be higher than English speakers. But is it? If similar usage, the problem is somewhere else.
From experience, the issues raised where total lack of CMYK, limited to 8 bit per channel,lack of even basic non destructive editing, crude paint engine, no healing tool, etc. Some have been solved partially or totally over the years, but too late for some users.
I've been a big fan of GIMP for the past 20 years or so. Sure, it has its quirks, is a little slower than I'd like, but it's still a useful, reliable software.
In fact, since they added support for 16 bit color, I can finally use it to do photo retouching. I mean, I was using it before, but it limited use-cases.
Now I'm not losing color anymore, and that's awesome!
I can see in the comments a lot of negativity towards this project, with a few valid reasons, but I think most of these people are trying to use GIMP like they would use Photoshop. But these are two different softwares with different capabilities. Stop fighting the tool and start working with it.
Thank you to all GIMP contributors. Thanks to you I can complety avoid Adobe's bullsh*t and still clean up the dust in my images :) Keep up the good work!
Oh, and if I may indulge in a request: a better foreground selection tool would be awesome. Faster, certainly, and maybe with some AI subject detection?
That would please me-- in Gimp I have to think carefully about every command. It seems like every choice for a default operation is the non-intuitive one.
That's a useful tip. I note the Glimpse people also have the marketing skills to put multiple pictures of the software on the landing page. Sadly Glimpse is on a development hiatus, according to the FAQ.
They try to hide this fact but the entire purpose of the Glimpse fork was the forker was upset about the name GIMP and wanted to rename it. No one cared and the years moved on so it's not surprising it's abandoned. See how they never mention GIMP by name and have a code of conduct as one of the nav bar links.
GIMP is great. I use it almost every day, albeit only for simple edits and markups. But I remember reading once that the lead maintainer of GIMP (not sure if still same guy) is not an artist and only actually uses the program once or twice a year to make postcards for his family. I bet his postcards are awesome, but it seems less-than-optimal that the people spearheading GIMP aren't actively using it. It's rude to say this, but that kind of explains some of the UX problems GIMP infamous for.
GIMP has been extremely useful over the years for all sorts of image processing tasks. Krita on the other hand, is the best for image composition (combining several layers) due to its non destructive filters. Imagemagick is great for scripted and complex workflows and large images. All my image needs are fulfilled by these three and it's great to have different tools
Because it's hopelessly outdated down to the very core and that's kinda secretly the reason why throwing money or workforce on it wouldn't really get anywhere. It would need to be rewritten entirely and paying for improving something existing or financing the creation of a new "FOSS photoshop" are very different things.
It's wonderful to see a piece of OSS add yet another year onto its life! More people should be aware of open source alternatives to mainstream/first-party software like Photoshop!
I'd sure like more features and a UI that looks like it wasn't made 27 years ago though. Keeps me from using it for day to day image editing or really anything advanced.
I want to love GIMP, I really do.
But at the same time, I despise how slow it was/is on OS X/macOS (especially when compared to how it works on Windows). I mean, what modern program takes more than 15 seconds to start? How come this slow start is plaguing macOS GIMP for more than what, 8 years now?
> Not copying anything useful from Photoshop was a point of pride.
Exactly. GIMP didn't have any actual improvements to offer, but they went out of their way to NOT make a PS clone, out of sheer pettiness and ego. Like, magic wand tool is called fuzzy selection or something? Why? Why introduce a point of possible confusion for no reason whatsoever?
I've used GIMP so much through my life. Krita is pretty good and better with the Wacom stuff, but I just reach for Gimp. Not for any good reason since last time it was unbearably slow on Apple Silicon.
Congrats! GIMP is great for people who can't afford a $100 software package to edit photos. It's been a long time since I was in that cohort, but I fondly remember using GIMP at that time.
So many gross comments in here. What is wrong with you people? :-P
Gimp is fantastic image editor and the freedom and price are just right. Been using it since the late nineties when I gave up Paint Shop Pro (which was a better every-day image editor than even Photoshop). I use it a few times a week to edit/convert my photos, web images, and album covers and it works quite well.
If you want something dedicated to your niche profession, go ahead and rent it and file negative entitled comments to /dev/null.
The GIMP project, while powerful, personifies all of the worst parts of OSS culture.
A needlessly polarizing/antagonizing name that they've refused to change? Check.
A user interface that no one but the developers could love or understand? Check.
A focus on knobs for users to tweak and being far behind the rest of the industry in basic usability improvements such as "auto levels" that have been table stakes for many years? Check.
Deflection of any criticism by saying "there's a plugin for that", when the plugin is probably locked in a filing cabinet in a basement closet with a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" and another saying "only supported up to <6 versions ago>"? Check and check.
I use Gimp and Inkscape a few times per month, not professionally. But for silly graphics, I prefer Paintbrush[1].
I agree that for complex drawings where you should align multiple objects and be able to adjust the width and other properties of the color, it's better to use Inkscape.
But for throwaway screenshots with a big red arrow or a circle around the part I want to highlight, I prefer Paintbrush.
Is it possible to add to Gimp an option to draw simple forms like in Paintbrush? Perhaps as a filter or a tool. Gimp looks very customizable, but I never went into that rabbit hole.
[1] MS changed the name to "Paint" like 20 years ago, but I never got the memo.
> But for throwaway screenshots with a big red arrow or a circle around the part I want to highlight
On KDE, the Spectacle screenshot tool comes with an "annotate" button that does exactly this. I agree this kind of stuff is very convenient, bonus points with a touchscreen.
There's some sort of weird inferiority complex when your graphics software is 27 years old and you're still saying 'look we used it for one of our website assets.' It's like telling people at the birthday party that you dressed yourself.
I find it equally strange that there are almost no screenshots on the website, outside of the docs and tutorial section, and those tend to be partial screenshots for highly specific exemplar purposes. There are good screenshots in the Release Notes, but that's not somewhere new users are likely to head to immediately. The landing page declares it's great for 'High Quality Photo Manipulation, Original Artwork Creation, Graphic Design Elements, Programming Algorithms' - but none of these categories lead to their own pages full of compelling examples.
I get that GIMPists are very proud of how community-driven it is, but the quality is extremely variable to the point of weakening the project. Having good politics/aspirations is very important, but before you can turn people into contributors you need to turn them into enthusiastic users. GIMP could learn a bit from the commercial products it competes with about how to present itself to the rest of the world.