GIMP is shaping up to be (and actually already is IMO) the best editor out there for nondestructive work.
Does the UX still suck though?
Nope. You just made the mistake of learning something else first and expecting other tools to match it
I remember a guy telling me back in 2015 or so that Gimp was designed for having 2 monitors. At first I tought it made no sense but some yers after I got the chance to try and it way more comfortable to put all toollboxes in a separate monitor.
That explains a lot of stuff actually
This is me with all CAD software 😭
My way into CAD software was 1. Dealing with DXF editors like QCAD. 2. Trying to tackle parametric CAD, I ran Onshape’s tutorials, they have pretty good technique tutorials, like how to draft a paperclip, that are applicable to most parametric CAD packages. Then learning how FreeCAD’s spreadsheet works.
FreeCAD has a full-on spreadsheet built in, now it’s feature poor compared to Excel or LOCalc but you can store and calculate dimensions there and then use them in the main drawing. Other software has features that accomplish this but it’s not as flexible and familiar as a spreadsheet. FreeCAD has some usability issues but everything else out there is either drawbackware or subscription.
Something new to learn for me. Didn’t know FreeCAD had that.
I’ll warn you now it can get a little tedious, because you refer to the data in a spreadsheet like referencing variables in a Python script. In most fields you can type in a dimension, you can click a formula button or hit the = key and then type in a formula. Or you can reference a cell in a spreadsheet. that might look like “=spreadsheet.A4” for the contents of cell A4.
That isn’t very readable and I don’t trust it not to break if you add rows or columns or whatever, so there’s an Alias function. You can give each individual cell a name. Which is slow and tedious. In the Addon Manager you’ll find some macros, one called EasyAlias which, select a cell, click the EasyAlias button, and the cell to the right of your selected cell gets the contents of the selected cell as an alias. In other words, if Column B is a bunch of labels and column C is the actual data, highlighting B2-B17 and clicking the EasyAlias button will automatically alias C2-C17. That feature should be built-in. There’s also a macro for clicking a dimension, clicking a sketch feature, and then semi-automatically applying a dimension. It’s slightly temperamental but it works faster than typing “Dimensions.notch_height” over and over.
I started with FreeCAD. Never changed 😉
This is true of pretty much all software. So many people expect to be able to pick up LibreOffice office and use it like they use MS office and then get immediately irritated the button doesn’t look exactly the same and give up.
Yeah butlike, I am using Calc, and I use the arrows, and it just, moves the view instead of which cell is selected, which feels really backwards.
I don’t recall that to be normal.
I had to check because that sounded crazy. So maybe your scroll lock key is on? If so Excel does the same thing.
I got irritated by the differences, but I was more irritated by Microslop, so it was the lesser of two irritants. I mostly figured it out eventually. Finding H2 is always at the bottom of the entire style list though for some fucking reason like there’s no excuse for that kind of mild irritation
You could always move it and submit a pull request. That is one of the beauties of open source!
Y’know what maybe I will. Fuelled by the power of irritation I’ll try and fix it. If anyone’s reading this in a few months and the header tags are in a logical order; you’re welcome
you’re right, but i need people to understand that this is simply not a workable solution for most people. the simple fact is if we want the average person to adopt more open source alternatives, it needs to improve usability even without their help. it’s not really enough to only cater to us power user nerds with “good enough,” and it doesn’t win hearts and minds to handwave complaints and tell people to come back with a patch.
We are talking about software built by, in many cases, volunteers. The only way it will get better, or good enough for the average person, is if those who can help do so. The only real alternative in practice is open source the way IBM, Google, and Oracle do it, and they wouldn’t do that anyway if the volunteers didn’t exist.
There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Software Imprinting Dilemma.
This is why most tech companies (including Adobe) are so hell bent on having schools teach just their software and their way of doing things. An entire generation of clients guaranteed for life.
i disagree. i started out on paint shop pro. moved to adobe. and then to affinity.
i have given gimp several chances through the years and it just can’t compete.
As always, it depends what you’re using it for and what your UI expectations are. But for me in particular, some people I’ve worked with, and presumably others, it can definitely “compete”. It does everything I need it to, and my workflow is faster. And I can throw a copy onto any old machine without having to jump through licensing hoops or download a “download manager” or whatever bolt-on shit PS needs these days.
Early on, for me, the killer feature was that it started up about 10x as quickly as PS, so I could start it, work, close it, get on with other work, whereas PS was so drearily slow that I’d leave it running all day rather than wait for it to launch, which meant that I had about half my RAM available for other things. It’s better now, and a lot of that has been obsoleted by faster CPUs and more resources in everyone’s computer, but I still remember how much of a chore it was to use PS.
I mean, sort of? I picked up Affinity Photo from Photoshop pretty quick because the UX isn’t crap.
Again, no, because Affinity is more similar to photoshop.
What exactly, is the “crap” part of gimps UX? I never had an issue with it.
Then again I really liked it when all the elements are not in the same space, it is very similar to high production work using multi monitors and having the actual canvas the focus.
And because it’s consistent. Gimp’s tools are random as all hell. It’s not just different, other tools have been designed by actual designers while Gimp’s community has been shooting them down for years. Leaving a confusing mess where shortcuts and tools have no obvious hierarchy or flow.
It’s cool it works for you but there is a reason everyone is able to learn Blender, Photoshop, Capture1, Resolve, Darktable, Krita, etc and suddenly get enraged at Gimp. I can’t think of any other project that gets this hate constantly. Darktable UI is rough too and the vibes are completely different. The Gimp community is toxic as fuck to criticism and it’ll be a miracle if there is anyone left willing to spend their precious time providing feedback. I’d love to see that change but I think as we see in the comments that many have moved on.
It’s cool it works for you but there is a reason everyone is able to learn Blender, Photoshop, Capture1, Resolve, Darktable, Krita, etc and suddenly get enraged at Gimp.
Yet I know a lot of people that use GIMP and have absolutely no problem with it. So is that true? I know people who cant learn blender too, but both of them are simply spend some time and it works.
The biggest, by far, issue I hear about GIMP used to be the way it managed layers, AND the lack of being able to draw a primitive shape. Thats about it.
Layers are better now.
The Gimp community is toxic as fuck to criticism
Citation needed. Never seen that before. The haters sure are though.
I mean look at this right now: GIMP announces improvements, and people instantly have to bitch and moan about how it isnt any good. The other person who replied to me said it wasn’t good because of “vibes”. Are you sure the GIMP community itself is the toxic one?
I swear people get all worked up because they don’t know how to use it, then get weird about it and decide its wrong.
All I can offer you is what I’d consider vibes. GIMP looks ‘old’. I don’t mind programs looking dated, but I absolutely mind them looking ‘old’ since that, to me, implies a worse experience compared to ‘dated’. It looks like it crawled out of the education software setting intended for mass adoption and only barely did so.
To be more specific, things like proper spacing between UI elements & UI and text spacing go a longer way than I think most FOSS developers that don’t work with UI expect. Everything feels cramped, like it is pressuring me to know what to do; there is a shocking lack of collapsible menu items and visual distinction is very low when parsing things like selected tool settings. Basic features are also somewhat unintuitive; when I go to drag a slider for opacity, for example, as an end user I don’t think that single clicking and dragging will select the actual numerical value of the slider. I expect to have to double click, otherwise I expect the slider to simply do what I want it to when I left click and drag it left or right.
I don’t think anyone reasonable expects to pick up heavily featured photo manipulation software and simply know exactly how to do as they please, but there are some surefire ways GIMP contributors can clean up GIMP’s UI and UX. I mean no ill will by this, because people who contribute to FOSS do so with their free time and money, but I feel like a lot of software developers and highly computer-literate users think ‘good enough to use for everyone I talk to’ means ‘ready for everyone to use’ and this simply is not true. Talk to any ‘normal person’ in a somewhat young* corporate design environment, for example, and they’ll probably scoff at you if you suggest GIMP measures up to anything Affinity or Adobe. Those people are dicks, but their attitude often comes from a place of valuable opinion. It is not keybindings or solid basic features that they feel is missing, it’s… polish, I suppose? ‘Completeness’? I’m unsure of the right word to use but something about GIMP just feels half baked, visually and feeling-wise at least.
Expecting it to be the exact same and working in an expected way are different. Blender used to select with RMB instead of LMB like every other program in existence, is it really the users fault for finding that stupid?
Following expectations and having a “smooth” workflow is something to aim for unless the standard is really bad. No need to fix what ain’t broken
First thing I always do is set icon scheme to have colors. I don’t know who thought monochrome for the tools was a good idea, but it takes me twice as long to find anything.
Personally, I struggled somewhat until I’ve found the
Search and Run a Commandaction. It’s bound to/on the keyboard by default I think. Otherwise accessible viaMenu > Help > Search and Run a Command.So if I’m clueless where a certain action is in the menu, I just press
/, then type my action as I think it could be named, then try it out. This, together with simply my memory of how to do things, covers 97% of my needs. One time out of 20 or 50 I encounter something that I don’t know, at which point I duckduckgo, and the experience can be much worse.Would you say this flow sucks? Or actually, it’s fine? It’s up to you to decide that.
Using / is awesome. Even if you know where things are in the menu it’s usually quicker to just type the first few letters and smash enter. I use it all the time.
which part do you dislike? maybe because it fits my mental model very well, but i find the ui to be very intuitive overall. keyboard shortcuts are also pretty simple…
and there’s some user made config that makes its ui and keybinds work like adobe photoshop if thats what youre used to
Finding things just feels unintuitive. Like I can never find how to do a basic task like cropping. Or resizing a layer, it does shit like grabs the layer under sometimes, ir just resizes the selection box instead of the selection.
It’s been perfectly fine for years, could certainly be made easier to visually parse but like… it does the job, it works, it’s fine.
When did it suck?
I’ve been using it professionally for the last 3 years or so and it’s no worse for UX than Photoshop, the ‘industry standard’.
Both GIMP and photoshop are very sophisticated and technical software (although Photoshop is becoming less so I should add).
People who have want a leaner set of tools should have a look at something like Tux Paint.
Maybe its better. I have used it off and on for like, 20 years or more now. It was crap for a looong time.
I stopped using GIMP for Krita, but it looks like GIMP’s nondestructive has come a long way.
Use Krita instead. It has a big tiddy anime waifu right on the splash screen.
If they add the feature to set white point in the level tool I’m there. Last I checked they had some bullshit brush-off about how it wasn’t relevant because it’s designed for drawing or some bollocks.
Sorry that my sketches were on paper that wasn’t pure white, I guess?
Now you got me.
Different project scope tho.
Krita does not support random niche format like GIMP.
Yes but the UI is 💯 easier to use.
The number 1 problem with GIMP is poor UI in my experience.
Easier interface AND anime aesthetics? Sign me up.
I used to work in schools IT and I managed to get a lot of FOSS tools into regular use amongst both staff and students; Audacity, Libre Office, Firefox, even Debian in a few IT labs… but the one that never stuck was GIMP because no teacher is going to tell their class they’ll be using GIMP today.
I know this is a tired point and will probably never be fixed, but that name causes more problems than anything else.
monkey paw curls, we keep it gimp but pronounce it gimp
gimp
G I M P
G(ee) I (A)M P(ee)
…
How dare you make me sound that out in my head.
I tried Debian for two hours and said fuck this and I went straight back to Ubuntu. I might try it again when I know more about it. For now I’m still very much a noob. Debian’s still Ubuntu’s boring cousin to me and I’m working on making it the fun one I want to invite over.
What puritanism does to a mf
proffessors could say “we’ll be using Gnu Image processing” or “Gnu Imp” if they wanted to get lame about it. The real big knoggin move is to just call it GIMP and silently dare your students to act like children
Kids would eat you alive.
Tell me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers without telling me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers.
Well shit, I never cared about the name but this convinced me because adoption and teaching about FOSS matters more.
Yep, always felt the same way. Can’t be seriously suggested in a professional environment simply because of its name. Whole project been shooting itself in the foot with a machine gun since day 1.
There’s a meme floating about somewhere that goes:
Windows Tool: Producix Pro for Business 2024
MacOS Tool: Sweesh
Linux Tool: klitoris
and this kinda feels like that.
This is always interesting to hear because as someone who went school in a non English speaking country, GIMP was obviously never an issue. In most of the world the name isn’t an issue.
I only learned about that alternative meaning years later.
But for millions of people it is… the fact that it isn’t for some cultures does not negate the influence for those where it is. Companies like Apple will skip numbers and names if it’s a problem in one place (like say China) because they realize more adoption is useful. Old Gimp heads though just whine about America or some shit and wonder why nobody fucking uses it after 30 years.
Everything about this project is always saying they’re looking for input and design ideas but their old-ass users shoot down every person that has anything to say, many of whom have ideas from working as actual professionals for those same thirty years.
We should rename it the Gnu Image Leveraging Framework.
I only learned about this “negative connotation” from people yelling about how GIMP name is bad.
I work in municipal government, and I just renamed the shortcuts on my work computer to avoid having to explain it to another mayor or councilmember. I think they’re adding Photoshop to the bufget anyway next year. GIMP is good for free, but I have to admit Photoshop really is the king of photo editors.
I do really like Inkscape though.
The FOSS software I find to be the most impressive, however, is QGIS. I have ArcGIS and QGIS both installed on my machine and use them both heavily. For data processing, I usually go with QGIS, but then I make most of my deliverables in ArcGIS because it has a way better layout editor and lots of other software and angencies require me to use ESRI REST services.
But I can go with the cheapest ESRI licenses because I don’t have to pay an extra 4 grand a year for the “Erase” tool when I can punch a hole in a shapefile in QGIS for free. And I openly said as much in my last meeting with ESRI when they were trying to get me to upgrade.
Could you eli5 why gimp doesn’t work as a name, i genuenly don’t know…
It’s a derogatory term as well as a BDSM term.
Ahhh ok noted
Genuine question, how did you know BDSM but not gimp?
One can know about a general topic and not know the details of the topic.
Is it derogatory?
Definitely thought it was a humiliation thing
Some consider it an ableist term
For the file format, would have been JSON instead XML not the better format? Its lighter and easier to parse and write, meaning more performant than XML.
I found a Stack Overflow thread where people discuss this and actually test it. Further down the page is a 2026 test. The results are it’s basically the same, very little practical difference in normal usage. If you’re auto saving a file every 30 seconds you will not notice any difference between XML and JSON.
Personally, I like XML more for data files like this. I would not reach for JSON as my first thought for deserealizing a complex object hierarchy. Stuff like, a polygon can have a drawing of type vector which can have n paths which each have exactly 2 points… easy to store and validate in XML. Quite messy and complicated in JSON.
<Drawing type="polygon"> <Line color="#fed1aa"> <Point x="6" y="7" /> <Point x="69" y="420" /> </Line> </Drawing>IMHO: XML is superior as a document storage format. JSON is superior as a data transfer format.
XML is not really superior to JSON as an image editing file format. EDIT: XML is better, if you want to keep a readable source format with markup. But that is not what a format for an image editing tool like GIMP should be needed for in my opinion.
I’m gunna disagree with you XML comes with validators and versioning as part of the XML spec. You can validate XML files against XSD descriptors that can be published and even referenced by the XML file.
The only downside of XML over json is that XML is verbose AF.
Strict validators, versioning, checking, and definitions is EXACTLY what you want in a storage format.
ODF is also XML. It makes sense here.
More information for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Schema_(W3C)
JSON comes with builtin data formats that XML lacks, that’s why you have such overhead with additional validation. Everything in XML is treated as strings, and there are lot of stuff like entities that is totally unneeded for a file format like in GIMP. XML Schema is needed because the format is extremely complicated unlike JSON, if you have no other validation. GIMP itself has validation builtin already.
You have it mostly backwards. XML has like 40+ types that are all standardized. JSON only has the basic JS types. XML is a superset of JSON when it comes to types.
How would you represent a double float, or binary data, or a datatime in JSON. You would have to use strings in JSON. In XML you would use the xsd:double, xsd:binary, and xsd:dateTime.
JSON only works if you think in JavaScript. For languages with more complete / complex data systems it does not do unless you resort to the string thing.
For your information:
Easier to read: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/jfsm/1.1.2.1?topic=queries-xsd-data-types
The official spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/
JSON items don’t have attributes, which sometimes makes queries outside of a specific path or across domains difficult or impossible.
“But if you take the time to design your objects correctly…”
Or they could just choose the format that already does what is needed instead of worrying about building and maintaining serialization layers to shoehorn in a functionality that they could get for free by picking the correct format in the first place.
Also why are we having this argument? XML isn’t going away, REST already beat SOAP, and JSON is harder to read. Compressed XML is only about 10% larger than compressed JSON, and we’re talking about the metadata of a layered image file so that’s like 16kb vs 15kb.
As explained, its not about the compressed size only. I am talking about uncompressed data that is live patched.
No, they are both not really suitable for that. But I don’t see where the link in the OP implies they plan to store binary image data in XML, they’re probably going to store that in a binary format and use XML to describe relationships and other metadata.
@schnurrito @thingsiplay Yes, the XML is for file structure descriptions not binary data.
The GEGL buffers we use for image data in GIMP can be synced across files, so this new format will allow us to quickly auto-save the image/layer/etc to file as you make edits. Still in-progress work, but it’s really cool.
Performance doesn’t matter unless you are dealing with gigabytes of xml. And ease of parsing/writing is irrelevant when it’s done under the hood by the program.
Performance matters a lot, because program can autosave in quick sessions after simple steps. Even more important if multiple images are edited or loaded. While this is not the biggest improvement, it is still something to keep in mind. Performance should always be a priority. Programs will keep expanding and add bloat over time, so its good to have a format like that in mind.
You should always measure first before blindly following dogmas. I doubt that the choice of serialization format is what dominates processor time in this case.
You should always measure first before blindly following dogmas.
Then you follow it by doubting it without measuring:
I doubt that the choice of serialization format is what dominates processor time in this case.
Also note I was not just speaking of today, but with future additions and changes. You can’t measure the future, but you can plan ahead and build upon a good foundation, that the small format can be used for extending it in future. That’s the idea. Also to test what you suggest they have to build the entire system years and waste lot of time and effort.
Agreed. XML has been dead for at least 10 years. Still, at least it’s not YAML.
Very interesting, thanks for the update
I’ve recently tried using GIMP again and, as a past detractor, I’ve gotta say it’s improved significantly.
exactly. i’ve used photoshop professionally and tried gimp then.
gimp is not quite there yet, but the potential can now be seen.
To be fair, Photoshop peaked about 10 years ago and has been steadily getting worse. It’s only a matter of time before they’re neck and neck.
i pin it around the time they turned it into a subscription with CC. is that 10 years ago already?
It was in the ballpark of 2014-15ish IIRC, so a little over ten years
Not to down on them too much but this comment is kind of funny in the context of a 30 year old program.
if you think about it, phones are where the “new” programs actually are.
Honestly so much better when they moved away from the “everything is a floating window” interface. I can find stuff now.
I really liked the floating window approach. I don’t mind the new way, but I enjoyed the floaties when they were the default.
There’s a toggle to go back
I haven’t trusted gimp since the first time I watched Pulp Fiction
The UI needs a global overhaul since the day one and still nobody talks about it
I can do loads of stuff despite GIMP’s efforts to stop me.
@BlackLaZoR @Vosh I think lots of people talk about it. :)
We have a dedicated UX site for people share to feedback on that very topic, which we try to implement as we can: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work/_items
The hope is that over time, designers will get more comfortable and work on larger design challenges (like how new code contributors start small and hopefully grow to develop more complex features)
I’ve been using Photo Gimp plugin with it for years. Otherwise the interface would be an absolute mess.
Can you turn it on and off easily? I know my way around photoshop but still want to learn vanilla gimp.
No it’s not just an on/off toggle. You’d have to uninstall the plugin. Install/Uninstall instructions are on the repo page. https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
I’ve never understood the purpose of PhotoGimp. I get why it exists. But it doesn’t do anything magical that GIMP isn’t already designed to let you do in the first place…which is move around, open, close and organize any window or dock into any place you want.
Anyone who has used GIMP for more than a few days has long since organized it to their own personal workflow; even some that look like photoshop.
The same goes for keyboard shortcuts. You can change literally everything about how GIMP looks anytime you want. So why lock yourself into some script that makes it look like a clone of some corporate crap, and worse…donate to the guy who designed said script as though he made something significant that no one else could achieve.
It’s very existence is a lie. Users aren’t locked into anything and he didn’t do some magic to change that. It’s literally how GIMP is designed to be customized.
Play with it. Have fun with it. That’s the entire point.
It’s basically just a drop in configuration to make it look and feel more like the Photoshop interface. Can you accomplish the same with tinkering? Sure. Do I want the spend all day trying to make it look pretty when I need to actually be working in the software? Hell no. Just drop in the plugin and get to work. It has it’s place. It would be less necessary if GIMP default layout didn’t suck right out of the box.
The page 404s
What is the upgrade?
I think that’s the new page : https://testing.gimp.org/news/2026/08/16/dev-update-august-2026/
@Hadriscus @phoenixz Just FYI, that’s from our testing page (note the subdomain), so it’ll give you a 404 again once we push it from drafts to the live site.
ah, the whole thing’s a draft. I understand now
Logo change!
i’ve used GIMP since 2017 bc photoshop was ridiculisly expensive and GIMP is free. i still use it. yes its ugly, but it works :3
I’ve been using GIMP for over a decade. It’s slowly starting to become one of the leading sources of frustration in my computing life. The more I learn about it the less it makes any sense.
Not trying to be negative here. Just saying that a modernization is much needed and I’m really excited for this.
Try FreeCAD if you really want to suffer.
FreeCAD had improved massively since the recent 1.0 release, unlike GIMP…
Honestly I switched to Inkscape more and more. Especially for logos.
ironically i find inkscape vastly more intimidating than gimp, inkscape’s interface is barely comprehensible at all whereas gimp is just slightly clunky.
It took me only 20 years to convince myself to Inkscape more. But it’s worth it. 😅
I’ve always wanted to see gimp on the same level of blender.
Blender is astounding at how much it can do, but boy does it feel like a project that suffered major scope creep. There seems to be years worth of “but what if it could also do this?” attached to it. As a novice Blender user I still find the UI incredibly difficult to work with.
I’m hundreds of hours in and I still sometimes accidentally hit the wrong hotkey and spend 39 minutes figuring out why edit mode doesn’t edit anymore, or why I can’t weight paint in weight mode.
Feature discovery has become more organic and less “unfuck blender” though, so that’s nice.
The grass is uh, slightly less brown on the other side I guess?
Phenomenal program though.
We <3 GIMP
no it isnt. we keep hearing this and no, they never have a massive upgrade. that project doesnt do massive. that’s not how it’s ever be run. its stable, predictable, sane, but ugly things we have all hated forever will never be massively revamped in a single update.
Leaving this here for Photoshop converts
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
I use Affinity full time at the moment, but if they ever go paid, I’m running straight to GIMP.
shoutout to diolinux. he does youtube too and is a great advocate for linux and foss.
i completely switched to Affinity suit some 3 years ago at work. I was so excited when the affinity4linux install script dropped. but performance makes it near useless. slow and stuttering.
here is for hoping gimp and inkscape can one day match.
My thing is that I use the iPad app with the pencil. The last time I tried GIMP it was great.
It is shocking how well-designed the Affinity apps feel on the iPad. I’m not entirely fond of everything being stuffed away in menus, but I see why they did it, and overall I’ve rarely felt so positively surprised about pleasant UX.
Now if only they hadn’t been bought by Canva… well, at least I still have my old Affinity 2 Suite.
