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
It would be cool if GIMP’s new format could remember the undo history. I sometimes save edited images as XCF projects so I can quickly make a tweak and re-export it if I need to, but if you do something like crop, color grade, etc., and then save it, you can’t undo that later when you reopen the project file because the original, unmodified image data has been lost. You can work around this somewhat by saving unmodified versions of something to its own disabled/invisible layer, but it would make things easier if there was some kind of undo history preservation so you could open a project and sift thru the history of operations performed on the image.
I haven’t trusted gimp since the first time I watched Pulp Fiction
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.
I love GIMP and no amount of tedious naysaying will ever change my mind
I keep discovering new capabilities
I did a few tutorials years ago. I realized that the way it did things was different from Photoshop and, in some ways, better. I could appreciate some of the design choices.
The problem is that most people learn PS first and then don’t learn Gimp at all, and then when they find out Gimp doesn’t work like Photoshop, they decide that it sucks.
Same! It’s great! And weird. But mostly great!
I’ve been using it for decades.
If they’d make the macroing system idiot proof, maybe talk to some portrait photographers about how they use Photoshop and help them achieve their workflows, they could seriously shut down some Adobe.
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.
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.
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.
Can you turn it on and off easily? I know my way around photoshop but still want to learn vanilla gimp.
Krita for the win if you just need the drawing part. Left Gimp long time ago for Krita and never looked back.
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.
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.
We should rename it the Gnu Image Leveraging Framework.
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.
What puritanism does to a mf
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.
Well shit, I never cared about the name but this convinced me because adoption and teaching about FOSS matters more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it derogatory?
Definitely thought it was a humiliation thing
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.
they better add a fucking draw circle tool istg
it exists lol, just make a circle selection and then “stroke selection”
It is okay to say that GIMP can technically do this, and also that it needs a straight up circle tool. Not having a live preview of what you are doing is not good UX in this situation.
“GIMP can technically do this” should be its tagline.
That’s how I felt when I discovered non-destructive layer transformations are (technically) possible
Or, hear me out, a tool that draws a circle.
Still bothered it doesn’t have a preview tho
@janus2 @Vosh You’ll be happy to know it’s in the cards. Proof of Concept now that we have vector layers: https://fosstodon.org/@CmykStudent/116455148076446506
I haven’t touched it lately since a new contributor was interested in implementing it, but one way or the other I hope to get it into 3.4.
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.
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. 😅
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.
We <3 GIMP
The page 404s
What is the upgrade?
Logo change!
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
