Friendly reminder to everyone that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photopea.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photopea.com</a> exists. If you are used to Photoshop, then the UI will be quite familiar.I only need to do basic stuff these days, so photopea.com is more than enough for me. Nothing to install, is ad-sponsored by default.

I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes. GIMP is a UX atrocity. The interface is a cluttered mess of meaningless panels and buttons. Worst for me is i&#x27;d spend 15 mins googling&#x2F;reading how to do something, look for the corresponding buttons for 10 minutes, be unable to find them, and later discover they were on a panel that wasn&#x27;t enabled by default (I didn&#x27;t even know you had to enable panels; i&#x27;d assumed everything that was available was there in front of me). On macOS some panels randomly disappear behind other programs.It was like using a computer program in your dreams where things don&#x27;t really have to make sense.My theory is this is a classic OSS problem where everyone wants to contribute their pet feature but the project lacks discipline and nobody wants to remove, organise, and improve (especially where the latter can be 10x harder and more tedious then the former). This could be an argument for opinionated leaders in OSS projects, because at least they&#x27;ll say &#x27;no&#x27; and do things &#x27;their&#x27; way a lot of the time, which is often better than the &#x27;anything goes&#x27; philosophy.

Between GIMP releases we saw entire graphics pipelines, conventions and workflows come and go. We had the Affinity suite, Canva, Paint.net, Clip Paint Studio, Sketch, various attempts from Adobe at expanding beyond the Photoshop ecosystem (Anyone remembers XD?), probably something else I’m missing right now. Now we’re in the age of Figma, with its own UI and quirks.At this point it’s probably easier to accept that the GIMP UI is simply what GIMP developers want it to be.True, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the same could be said about Turbotax, Jira, SAP… or God may have mercy on your soul, Avid Pro Tools.It is what it is. It’s not like there are no alternatives anymore.

From tfa&gt; A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.I see no active resistance. If you have feedback, maybe share it with them?

Gnome does UX and UI very well, though.

The attitude partly affects GNOME too, any time you&#x27;d constructively criticize it on places like their Issue tracker or r&#x2F;gnome, their defenders would come with pitchforks at you. Glad I moved to KDE nearly a decade ago.

It&#x27;s just sad. Nobody wants to fork it because nobody uses GIMP, so forks get almost no traction. People love the effort and commitment, install it, try it for a couple of tasks, fail, and never come back. It has built up this reputation of being terrible, and no one wants to give it a second chance after their first impression.I think it&#x27;s a lesson in how not to run an open-source project. I put it in the same category as Darktable, which gives off that exact same bad first impression.

It could also be that the Gimp team and community wants their software a certain way, and I don&#x27;t see why one should disrespect that?Those who disagree are welcome to fork- and maintain it, if the users see value in it, they&#x27;ll switch.

You know what? The hate GIMP gets in the comments is entirely self-inflicted. Everyone praises Krita and Blender because their UIs are consistent and look good. GIMP, on the other hand, looks like a toddler worked on it: switches are huge compared to text, buttons and text have no padding and are squeezed together, and icons are oversized and scattered everywhere.People might say, &quot;You can just join the project and fix it yourself.&quot; But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.

The learning curve certainly is a lot steeper than Photoshop or similar tools, and the GUI is very much counter intuitive compared to other graphics tools. Add that it lacked tons of nondestructive editing, smart objects etc. The poping out of different panels also get annoying super quick.

That “overbearing assumption” is made by practically every other X-media editing app, for good reason — you can save your work and continue&#x2F;revert stuff later. If all you’ve ever used is MS paint then I guess it’s an unexpected thing, but any other image&#x2F;video editing app, digital audio workstation, 3D modeling software, etc… work exactly the same way. It would be unexpected to me if “save as” exported a flat file.

Export and Save As should be the same menu item with an option in the dialog.There are many many more but start with the app having the overbearing assumption that it thinks you want save to its file format rather than make an ad hoc edit.

I&#x27;m a fairly casual &#x2F; infrequent user, but they&#x27;ve already addressed most of the things I found infuriating in the past.The big remaining thing I can think of is the &quot;layer boundary&quot; thing, which (it seems to me) is very confusing for new users and inconvenient for all users.I also have a vibes-based feeling that when I used to use Photoshop twenty-five years ago I was a lot more productive than I&#x27;m able to be in GIMP, but I can&#x27;t be sure if that&#x27;s just because I used to do more graphic stuff back then and I&#x27;ve never picked it up to the same degree. I find myself having to hunt for things in menus a lot, but that might be a me problem. Photoshop also took a while to get used to.Edit: I basically agree with the people complaining about Save and Export being unexpectedly separate, although I also think it&#x27;s not that hard to press Ctrl+E instead of Ctrl+S.

Where is the obligatory &quot;Maybe you should learn to program and contribute the changes yourself.&quot; from the bootlickers?

For decades, the tools panels floated separately from the image window, and the authors resolutely refused to put them in a single window.Then one day, they did it. They put the tools on the same window as the image, as Deluxe Paint did in 1985. FINALLY.... but at the same time, they introduced the absolute bollocks that is &quot;if you hit save we&#x27;re going to spam you indefinitely into using our format&quot;.In any other tool, if you _open_ a file (e.g. a PNG, JPEG, or in say LibreOffice&#x27;s case, a CSV or XLSX), and then hit &quot;save&quot;, it can nag you once that you&#x27;re not using the tool&#x27;s preferred file format, and _may_ be missing some important feature that only its preferred format supports... but you should just be able to click &quot;fuck that, save it as the format I loaded it as&quot; and not hear that again.Not GIMP. It fucking well refuses to let you save as the format you opened. You have to cancel your &quot;save&quot; of the file you opened, and instead &quot;export&quot; to the file you opened... at which point it warns you you&#x27;ll overwrite THE FILE YOU WANT TO SAVE. And after you&#x27;ve done that, and try to close the image, it&#x27;ll warn you you haven&#x27;t saved THE FUCKING FILE IT JUST FORCED YOU TO USE &quot;EXPORT&quot; TO SAVE because you didn&#x27;t save it in its preferred format ABSOLUTELY GO FUCK YOURSELF, GIMP, I AM NOT GOING TO SAVE AS XCF A JPEG I AM CROPPING AND WILL NEVER EVER EDIT AGAINThis is why I completely gave up on GIMP and will never open it again. I would like to line up all the GIMP authors in a row, and run down the line slapping them all in the face with a wet trout.If anyone from GIMP is listening:<pre><code> * User opens a non-native format, e.g. JPEG
 * User hits &quot;Save&quot;
 * Present user with a dialog like so:
 This image may contain content that cannot be saved in the currently selected file format &quot;JPEG&quot;
 Use the default XCF file format to be sure the image is saved correctly
 [x] Ask when not saving in XCF or default format
 [Use JPEG format] [Use XCF format]
 * User can turn off this nag globally by deselecting &quot;Ask when not saving in XCF or default format&quot;
 * If user selects &quot;Use JPEG format&quot;, future saves of this file will not nag again</code></pre>

I don&#x27;t get everyone&#x27;s complaints about the interface. I&#x27;ve been using it for years, once you learn where things are I can get what I need done. The learning curve (finding where functions are, the right tools for each job, etc.) wasn&#x27;t much different from other software like Blender or Darktable (or even Davinci Resolve).The panels concept might be the most intuitive part of it, but Blender also has different panels and modes. And the tools being combined into few buttons is similar to CAD programs I&#x27;ve used.Anyone enlighten me on actual usability problems (and not pedantry like &quot;the spacing of these buttons is uneven&quot;?) Perhaps I&#x27;ve gotten used to using unintuitive software.

Autosave sounds nice, I’m excited to have that!I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.

Zipped xml i wouldn&#x27;t tbh. Its just not a great random access container. Compressed xml in a sqlite? Sure.

Zipped XMLPreparation for the future XCF (24.09.2023)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.gnome.org&#x2F;GNOME&#x2F;gimp&#x2F;-&#x2F;work_items&#x2F;10076" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.gnome.org&#x2F;GNOME&#x2F;gimp&#x2F;-&#x2F;work_items&#x2F;10076</a>Someone proposed newer ser-&#x2F;deserialization approaches, but this didn&#x27;t result in a discussion.

They should make it easy to install and use GenAI plugins (without messing with GPU drivers, etc.)

&gt; Krita and other image editors)Krita is not an image editor but a digital painting program. GIMP is a much more complete image editor despite its quirks.

Yep, even music software like Ableton Live is using zipped XML for the project files (although the much bigger audio files are stored independently in sub-folders). There were even efforts to use the XML format to manage Ableton project files with git in order to have a nicer change history (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clintburgos&#x2F;ableton-git" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clintburgos&#x2F;ableton-git</a>).

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zepouet&#x2F;Xee-xCode-4.5&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zepouet&#x2F;Xee-xCode-4.5&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;XeePhot...</a>:<pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; At this point, I&#x27;d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
 &#x2F;&#x2F; insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
 &#x2F;&#x2F; worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
 &#x2F;&#x2F; that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
 &#x2F;&#x2F; places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
 &#x2F;&#x2F; too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
 &#x2F;&#x2F; that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
 &#x2F;&#x2F; should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
 &#x2F;&#x2F; or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
 &#x2F;&#x2F; of course, uses all three, and more.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
 &#x2F;&#x2F; your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
 &#x2F;&#x2F; birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
 &#x2F;&#x2F; at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
 &#x2F;&#x2F; responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
 &#x2F;&#x2F; I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
 &#x2F;&#x2F; me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
 &#x2F;&#x2F; other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
 &#x2F;&#x2F; difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
 &#x2F;&#x2F; was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
 &#x2F;&#x2F; so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
 &#x2F;&#x2F; Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
 &#x2F;&#x2F; them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
 &#x2F;&#x2F;
 &#x2F;&#x2F; PSD is not my favourite file format.</code></pre>

It&#x27;s not that weird. Most of Office and Open office formats are just zipped folders of XMLs.Better Zipped XML than whatever monstrosity Adobe files are. PDF&#x2F;PSD... shudder.

Zipped XML? Isn&#x27;t that just OpenRaster? (which is already supported by GIMP anyway, but also supported by Krita and other image editors)

Haven&#x27;t those existed in Krita forever?

That is probably the V3 feature I&#x27;d notice most in daily use. Non-destructive editing makes experimentation much less costly; without it, every “maybe this looks better” becomes another layer or file copy.

Non-destructive filter layers caught my eye, and has been something I&#x27;ve missed since moving off Windows&#x2F;Photoshop to Linux. Looking around it seems like they introduced this in V3, which is great to see.

important here to remember that Blender was created within the industry as a commercial tool. When open sourced the leader of the project remained and knew quite well what separated a good creative tool from a bad one. It was always situated in a position where the core users were either hobbyists or professionals.Gimp was never in such a situation.Culture is important.

So GIMP has a larger user base than Blender, what is your point ?

I’m going to take the bait:I know a lot of people don&#x27;t like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options&#x2F;conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. GIMP is the perfect example of that and generally speaking UI&#x2F;UX is the main symptom.Blender was able to move forward by not listening to the FOSS crowd but to the industry. And see where are they now compared to GIMP.

I love that GIMP exists but... I have to say, it never got rid of the &quot;backend developer doing frontend&quot; feeling, and I&#x27;ve been aware of Gimp for 20 years now (did not know how to...ehem, run photoshop in my teens)

Do you have your special dark mode glasses on?Because I fail to see all the comments here as negative and unfounded.
(and my guess why there is often negativity towards GIMP, is because it was too often advertised as a adequate Photoshop replacement, which it is not, so people got disappointed with it)

… and the sizes of their updates are usually impressive! Seems to be a big project that is managed well to keep a good pace and keep the community in the loop. (Although I don’t know much about their inner workings.)

It&#x27;s a great piece of software. Best feature - not having your colours retrospectively removed from your project [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;graphic_design&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rdtodb&#x2F;adobe_to_remove_pantone_colors_from_creative_cloud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;graphic_design&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rdtodb&#x2F;adob...</a>

Yes, it is very pleasant to have it around. Especially when you switch to something else.

I can guarantee that anyone turning up and contributing or forking this project will not lead to the outcome of a improved piece of software.It will lead to someone with the insight on how to make actual material improvements frustrated and angry that they don&#x27;t have the technical skill (or time) to grapple with a complex codebase, and the people with the technical skill working on the codebase dismiss people with actual knowledge in different domains.&quot;Patches welcome&quot; is not any kind of welcome. It&#x27;s basically a euphemism for &quot;fuck off, I don&#x27;t want to have a conversation to make something better, I just want to hack on Feature X&quot;.

Furthermore, it&#x27;s free software. If people have a problem with it, they&#x27;re free to show up and contribute, or fork if the community is really opposed to their ideas (they probably are for good reason, though).

As usual, whenever GIMP is involved, all we get are negative, often unfounded comments about an excellent piece of free software that is massively used and developed with very limited resources, doing its job really well.There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.

After the first run (where it has to evaluate plugins etc) it starts in under 4s on 26.04 on my Lenovo P53 (laptop from 2019). Which is admittedly not exactly snappy, but it&#x27;s OK IMO.

Is the Ubuntu version of GIMP distributed as a snap package? I&#x27;ve had horrible performance with snap apps.

I just installed Ubuntu 26.04 and it&#x27;s gimp starts for 14 seconds.

No that would be an early 1990s file format ;)1999 is exactly right for the start of the XML hype, everything had to be XML, it would single handedly solve the software crisis (after OOP failed to do that) because everything would be able to talk to everything!

Let&#x27;s be honest, the real 1999 design would have been a custom binary format that happens to use the endian of the system it was developed on, and leaks bits and pieces of unflushed memory buffers whenever it writes to disk.

SQLar[1], see [2] for some reasoning around why a database is preferred over zipped XML. Though, I&#x27;d be fine with a DBM-style database too as we only need the key-value part of it.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;sqlar&#x2F;doc&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;README.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;sqlar&#x2F;doc&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;README.md</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;affcase1.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;affcase1.html</a>

Compressed JSON with the binary content encoded in base64 strings, obviously.

What would you consider good modern design?

Fundamentally, it&#x27;s not.The problem was that people hyped it up as the solution for every problem and all the world&#x27;s ills, so it wound up being used where it had no business being used (and therefore badly).XML was a hammer used to bang in a lot of things that weren&#x27;t remotely nail-shaped, and accordingly, a certain percentage of traumatised people despise it and react to any mention of it with fear and loathing.It&#x27;s kind of neat when you have an application for it that really leans into its strengths.

The obvious alternative is SQLite, and it has many advantages. If you want to do a &quot;zipped list of files&quot;, SQLite does that just fine (that&#x27;s what SQLar is), but it can do so much richer data. Even if you don&#x27;t want that, it still offers resiliency that &quot;zipped XML&quot; can&#x27;t match: if your software or computer crashes in the middle of saving your file, it&#x27;ll almost certainly corrupt it. With SQLite, not an issue: all transactions are atomic, they either happen entirely or not at all.I don&#x27;t know what &quot;mature tooling&quot; you&#x27;re talking about for zipped XML, but I guarantee you it&#x27;s not going to be better (or more mature) than SQLite and its ecosystem.

Thanks! I had the exact same question for various of these posts here. I know these may be different groups of people, but I always see people advocating for simplicity, and zipped-XML is as simple as it gets, needs barely any extra dependencies (none in GIMP I assume), and is proven to work well (Word etc).I also don’t understand why SQLite would be preferable here, considering you will likely also store large binary files alongside your document definition.. What does a db engine give me here?

Welcome to 2026 unfounded hot takes.Or less snarky: what&#x27;s your gripe with zipped XML? It compresses reasonably well, has a useful structure, and has decades of mature tooling around it.

A &quot;ksceef&quot;?But yeah, in my mind, it&#x27;s always been &quot;ex see eff&quot;, so an XCF.

I find some word processors don&#x27;t test for vowel sound, and only adhere to the actual vowel letter.

&gt; With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.I know, hence my question about the pronunciation. If I had thought the spelling was more important, the “X” would have settled it so I wouldn’t have asked.

The beginning of “XCF” sounds similar to the beginning of “Exit”.With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.

&gt; For instance, we’re quite proud that a XCF file made by a small company for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMPHow do they pronounce “XCF” such that it’s “a XCF file” and not “an XCF file”? “Xeceff”?

SQLite would have been a lot better choice, in my opinion.

json&#x27;s only advantage is it&#x27;s easier to write by hand, but that&#x27;s not really a consideration here. XML has schema support and much more tooling available.

&gt; As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards &amp; existing software examples around JSON for project &amp; records managementI don&#x27;t understand why that is relevant; as long as there is a minimum level of tooling, libraries and support for their choice, what benefit would JSON bring over XML? I don&#x27;t see a clear reason for one over the other.Honestly, I&#x27;d have the same question if they chose JSON and someone asked why did they choose JSON over XML - Why wouldn&#x27;t they?

JSON made me not hate XML. YAML made me not hate JSON.

Pardon my ignorance about formats, but between XML &amp; JSON, what would have made them choose XML? As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards &amp; existing software examples around JSON for project &amp; records management (e.g. VSCode&#x27;s records as settings.json for example). Wasn&#x27;t XML spearheaded by Microsoft but mostly used by Microsoft today?

“Great”.No offence to anyone, but I would not consider the performance of MS office to be great.I guess it&#x27;s comparative, but then I compare to its previous editions which used a sliver of the resources to accomplish 95% of what modern o365 does.

&gt; It&#x27;s slow and bad.Seems to have been working great for MS Office.

Zipped XML sounds like a bad idea. It&#x27;s slow and bad. I say XCF forever.

That effort didn&#x27;t last long. I think this is the first I&#x27;ve heard about it since inception, the repo (assuming this is the right one, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshgiesbrecht&#x2F;Glimpse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshgiesbrecht&#x2F;Glimpse</a>, it was the only GIMP related thing that came up amongst a sea of unrelated projects with the same name) is hasn&#x27;t seen a commit in 7 years and what appears to be the official site away from a forge (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getglimpse.app&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getglimpse.app&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>) is currently unresponsive.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;glimpse-gimp-fork-archived&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;glimpse-gimp-fork-archived&#x2F;</a> Yep, it&#x27;s dead.

I&#x27;m surprised it got that epithet, I&#x27;m used to &quot;upset by weird sex stuff&quot; as being a US-right position, and &quot;woke&quot; being a term that&#x27;s used by US-right to denigrate US-left.Then again, I&#x27;m also old enough to have seen it shift significantly in meaning at least once, and I think I&#x27;m seeing it shift meaning again.

Pretty sure woke gimp was long discontinued

I thought every developer of this moved to the Glimpse fork

GIMP Development Update