For me on Arch Linux, Inkscape definitely doesn’t ship with its own Python. and its source code suggests to me [0] that it shells out to any Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or shell) that it can find on the PATH.
It probably ships with python on some platforms. Pretty sure it does on Windows.
But it does not really have a python API. Most (all?) extensions that ship with Inkscape are written in python, and it comes with some base classes and helper modules to make those extensions. But the "API" is basically "we send the current document to the extension's stdin, and whatever comes out as stdout becomes the new document". The extension, written in Python or something else, is responsible for handling all the quirks of SVG (a mix of subsets of two or more of the SVG specs) and (the current version of) Inkscape's additions to SVG.
It is quite painful. I have maintained a couple of third-party extensions written in python since back in Inkscape 0.99.x days (ca 2007). Had to do several annoying major rewrites. Since there is no real API you depend on whatever happens to be in those helper classes, rarely documented and never stable. One of my extension, as do some of the first-party extensions, have to rely on launching Inkscape as a sub-process to perform some work, since there is no way to call in to the running Inkscape. If there was a real API you could have functions to call to query about the boundaries of objects, and other functions to apply changes to objects, that could use internal implementations that are already existing and that can do those things. But the way it works now (and always worked in Inkscape) is that you have to take care of everything yourself, more or less, maybe helped by some of the included helpers if you are lucky to find something that does something similar to what you want to do.
Pretty much done with this. I stopped officially supporting new Inksape versions. I just tell users that the next time Inkscape messes with their not-really-API my extensions will be dead. I can still run them with old Inkscape in some virtual machine. Maybe I will re-implement everything if I find an application that has strong backwards-compatibility goals.
I'm patiently waiting for resynthesizer to be ported. Then I will make the move to 3.0. I've used GIMP exclusively as my image editor for the past two decades and it has fulfilled my needs for web development. I really don't get all the gripe around it. It's one of the most valuable free programs on my PC. Sure, it does take time and possibly customization to get yourself a comfortable workflow. But once you get it down, you can do basically everything you need with keyboard shortcuts and blaze thru editing really quickly.
Thank you for that link! I've installed 3.0.0-RC3 and so far I'm pleased. I've noticed a few new behaviors like moving multiple layers now with shift instead of the previous layer link.
3.0 felt a little weird for the first day or two, but as someone who likewise has used Gimp mostly for web stuff for (almost) 20 years, I really like 3.0 compared to 2.x so far. Text is slightly more finicky but way more powerful, for instance.
I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing.
I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great.
I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.
If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.
I would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope.
For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.
The few people I know doing visual design still balk at a program that lacks native CMYK editing. Honestly I'm still skeptical about the significant improvements made for 3.0 due to the project's history.
I remember CMYK being the most common complaint (after the UI) 20 years ago, too. And at the time the entire GIMP project insisted that you never needed it and RGB was good enough. By coders for coders, indeed.
For what it's worth, a full CMYK mode is on my personal to-do list after the final 3.0 release (though 3.0 RC has had CMYK import/export and soft-proofing for a long while). I made a prototype implementation earlier (https://twitter.com/CmykStudent/status/1618261982628704259) and with all the color space improvements made since, it should be even easier to prototype now.
Out of curiosity, what improvements in 3.0 RC are you skeptical of? If you're willing to share, it'd be helpful feedback for us. :)
I don’t know. RGB was good enough. For every 1 person out there digitally processing art for a children’s book, which is the only piece of printed media I could think of whose lifecycle does not feature immediate disposal, there are 19 who would love their HDR iPhone photos to look right, so if anything, they should be worrying about P3.
This I feel is a fair complaint, I have seen it many times but I have to admit I am not a visual designer so I do not really understand it. Allow me to enumerate.
rgb is a larger color space than cmyk, that is to say the colors that cmyk can represent are a subset of rgb.
You are doing the work on an rgb monitor. what does having the illusion that you are working in cmyk get you? just use a cmyk color picker
but most damning, industrial printers are not CMYK, they are spot color, that is, they will be filled with essentially random primary colors chosen to best fit the final print. When you do need very fine control over the final color, you don't want a cmyk aware system you want a spot color aware system. And even then, you will only get close, requiring many test prints to validate the final result.
Irrespective of technical merit, if your printing shop requires a CMYK PDF, they requires a CMYK PDF.
You're not going to argue and discuss the merit of such and such color spaces with them; you're going to switch tools so that you get them to print your wedding invitations.
Same here. Affinity is great, it has some quirk and some basic features are scattered around the UI without seemingly much thought.
But every time I have to use Gimp is just a pain, feels like going back in time.
For such a complex tool, UX is and will always remain king. That's why many people miss even something as simple as the Mac Preview tool, it does its job nicely and neatly. It doesn't do much but for basic stuff is quick and straightforward.
It's not made for coders, it's made for the benefit of whomever uses it, and many people use and bundle it as well. I do understand the issues that people are experiencing with it UX-wise, but the answer to that is not that it's being made for coders, it's that it's an open source project, and as such, it has other incentives, than giving the best UX possible. Also, since it's open source and not for-profit, it has other circumstances than proprietary projects do. For-profit projects live and die on profit, and for b2c profit, you have to have good UX (like Affinity), or for b2b, good connections (like Cerner, or Windows). What open source projects need is being able to hold their main contributor's attention and dedication to the project. Entirely different ballgame. And, yes, very different UX as well. I also stopped fiddling with GIMP - what I do I can do 10 times faster in f** Photopea of all software.
We actually set up a UX repo to better track issues with UI/UX, and to get feedback from designers and other members of the community. If anyone's interested in helping, feel free to post issues and discuss on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues
Gimp is nearing 30 years old, and it has been used for at most a handful of animation movies. I think, regarding its usage, that this is more of an outlier, than a main purpose of the software. So I don't think that this example refutes OP's point.
I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders. Being made for coders is a bad claim as well, at most, it's a jab at its user interface, which, I think, is no worse then Photoshop's by the way, it's just that people are familiar with one, and the not the other.
A good refutal of the for-coders claim would be that it's one of the default image editor most commonly included with major Linux distributions. That's a much larger thing than it being just made for coders.
> I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders.
Yes it does because ZeMarmot producers are the main contributors to Gimp's code.
The GIMP was an at least 17 year old software project, when the animated movie was announced.
Of the two main GIMP maintainers, one of them works on ZeMarmot.
What this all says is that yes, there is an animation movie 10 years in the making, by some of the people who also work on the GIMP project. It says nothing about GIMP being made for any particular purpose, either or not for coders, and/or for animation or for visual creatives in particular.
As I've said exhaustively before, this is also reflected in the stupid stubbornness in not changing the name.
I firmly believe they could have eaten Adobe's lunch decades ago, but I can't recommend something that may be an ableist slur, and definitely means something that is the opposite of "skilled."
gimp became way less annoying once i discovered the command pallette (the forward slash key), you can pretty much do everything with it. i even use it to switch tools sometimes sinces its easier than trying to look through all the tool icons or having to long press them
You can change both if you like (it's one of the first things I do whenever I install GIMP on new systems)! In 2.10, you can change the icons in Preferences under the Icon Theme section, and remove tool groups in the Toolbox section.
In 3.0 it's even easier, as both options are available in the Personalize tab of the Welcome Dialogue. I'm hoping this will help make that feature more discoverable. :)
I think both of those are resolved in GIMP 3. You can multi-select layers, and when you do it shows the total boundary for all selected layers. If you're willing to try it out, feel free to share if there are other issues you'd like us to look at!
I am mostly using krita for painting and gimp for general editing and composing usually so I haven't double-checked every single feature on both but I have one example: krita can open a pdf but cannot save it and doesn't even have a "print" functionality. Found out when trying to sign a contract with krita on my convertible thinkpad. Gimp makes it a breeze in comparison.
I am sure there are other features missing in both directions. It is great to have choice.
I haven't missed anything in my usage, I just wish it had photoshop's easy automation tools where I could record and save my actions but Krita has scripting support so I'll learn that eventually.
I switched from Photoshop CS to Gimp, and it took me 5 years at the time :) I kept on working on CS for that time, and ran gimp on the side on a VM running linux (it was the crunchbang distribution, a cool debian distrib).
Gimp's Dotfiles on Linux are really well done, once your settings are done, you keep them forever (i barely changed them now for a decade).
I was really used to Photoshop (used it from photoshop 4 to CS) ; a good idea would be to change Gimp's bindings to the one you have on photoshop.
Some stuff won't work as well as Photoshop, the best is to experiment, and find alternatives maybe not in the most optimal way.
I used to produce pictures, and then tried to do the same thing on Gimp, using the same source files. Stopping when I was stuck, trying to find other ways to work.
It isn't alternative to photoshop though, what about darktable (https://www.darktable.org/)? I could be wrong but it is more of an alternative to lightroom afaik. Have you used?
Thanks for the suggestion. I've never been really into the "catalog" apps, starting from itunes. Always been more of a winamp guy ;) I like to browse my files from the explorer and not having to deal with a software to navigate or a software to catalog files and corrupting my filetree.
I've been using gimp since one week and so far, once you start trying to understand what's going on (something I never allowed it since 20 years I've tried), it's really not that bad.
Darktable may have a catalog, but like you, I've never seen the value in that. It's primary purpose is as a RAW editor, and it's pretty good at that. Highly recommend it as a first pass for any digital photography. That, or Rawtherapee.
Inkscape is an SVG editor. It's in the name. I for one love having a tool with semantics so close to the format, instead of dealing with Illustrator's nonsense. Sometimes Illustrator is the right tool, but as a web developer, Inkscape is the only sane tool for manipulating SVG.
You might like Pinta. It's my favorite no nonsense image editor for basic drawing and quickly changing stuff. Not for big projects, just editing a few pixels, resizing, brightness, cropping, painting, flood filling, basically classic MS Paint but with layers.
It's a fork of Paint.NET, which happens to be my favorite image editor on Windows. The Mono-based port is a bit flaky and crashes sometimes, but the Gimp UX is just unusable for me, so Pinta it is. I tried gimp many times, but I just end up reading forums and often the program either can't do the small stuff I want, or it takes 5 minutes of clicks.
I've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around.
My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems :
- Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird)
- Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu
- Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock
- SMB compatibility is hell
- Finder is hell
- ...
Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works".
The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.
I worked in prepress, so pretty good an Photoshop, and vastly prefer GIMP. The problems with GIMP are technical, there are some necessary things for some jobs that it simply hasn't been able to do, but I'm seeing a lot of work being done on them.
The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough.
Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that.
GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
Gimp 3.0 is still in release candidate and nobody is forced to move to gimp 3.0 until their favorite plugins are ready.
Additionally it is trivial to have both installed on the same machine and there haven't been breaking changes in the xcf format as far as I know so you can open the same file on both version without issues.
seconded. i used a lot of photoshop CS2 and CS3, as well as gimp from the same time period. for the most part i felt they were on-par with each other at the time.
but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.
I tried 3.0 RC2 the other day and discovered that the new UI is much less space efficient. It imported my panel layout from 2.10 (which I spent a long time getting just right), and I had to completely rearrange it to get it to fit on a 1080px tall monitor. Very frustrating.
Hi! Would you be willing to post more details on your drawing tablet (either here or on our issue tracker https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity). We've gotten a lot of reports that tablets have better support in 3.0, so if there's some regression we'd definitely like to get that fixed.
Are there specific areas of the UI that are less space efficient? One of the big changes was switching our GUI library to GTK3, which is suppose to scale better on HiDPI screens. But we had to recreate our theming system as a result, so if we need to tweak something we can try.
I recently moved from an old Ubuntu MATE to Debian Trixie Cinnamon with 2.0 UI scaling and had the same problem. I overrode this with the environment variable GDK_SCALE=1 for GIMP and was able to more-or-less duplicate the previous compactness.
The theme might have helped too - I am using Yaru-cinnamon-dark. Some themes are truly wonky, with objects changing size and forcing re-layout on hover. WTaF that should not even be possible!
Will continue to say it, this piece of software that could be a mainstream huge deal, a straight-up Adobe killer, will never do this unless it changes its name.
I've mostly given up hope on this, but it's still wild that people who work on the software just seem to very stubbornly not understand this.
Whether you want to blame it on ableism, or perhaps simply "you should name your software after something/someone skilled or professional, not literally the opposite," you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it.
Luckily, Krita's here and for better or worse does the AI stuff.
That's probably true. But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal.
It serves a valuable community function by protecting the community from corporate interests, non-technical bike-shedding, and overload by "bug" reports that are actually just the user not being technical enough to use the tool properly.
Edit: Also FWIW, I've had no problem introducing GIMP to church groups and in various professional settings.
Double edit: since you mention schools, I should also add that I taught my wife GIMP and she had no problem sharing it in her school (US public high school).
> But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor…
Some folks who are neither prudish or humorless want to see the project and its contributors succeed to the degree that alternatives like Photopea has, or as Blender has in the 3D space. The project will continue to limp along until the name is changed to something without negative connotations in English-speaking populations.
Point taken — the name is just one of many issues between GIMP and Blender-like success. But there are also open source projects like Inkscape, which enjoyed success in part because of a rechristening that eliminated the headwinds of previous bad names.
> his piece of software (...) will never do this unless it changes its name.
Why?
Honestly, why?
As a non-native English speaker (like the vast majority of people in this planet), the word "gimp" to me means "the free software image processing program". If I search google, duckduckgo, bing, whatever, the entire first page of results refers to that very program. Digging deeper, I start to find some references to the Pulp Fiction movie, where a minor character is named like that. I remember that character, but in my language it was called by a different name. Is that all?
Is there any other meaning to this word? If so, it must be so obscure as to be completely irrelevant.
Please, take into account that most English speakers are not native speakers, and many words will have a different meaning to us. English as a lingua franca may be comfortable to native speakers, but it also means that it's no longer yours.
The name of the program does not seem to be a serious issue for its adoption. Now, if you want to talk about its user interface... I don't think it does, either (but I may be open to discussion). I have taught my kids to do simple image processing tasks in gimp: copy-pasting parts of an image into another, removing some stuff, blurring, simple layer operations, etc. Anyhow, they got it in a few minutes. Important to say: they are not at all tech-savvy (to my dismay! but this is another story). If they use adobe or krita they will surely find it slightly confusing at the beginning, but no big deal either. Just like a regular person moving from photoshop to gimp.
A gimp is a man dressed in a bondage suit used for BDSM sexual roleplay. Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings. The GIMP software might as well have the name of a curse word like fuck or shit as far as its appropriateness in public discourse goes.
Literally, get over it. Even my (extremely conservative) church group doesn't have an issue with it. 1) because most people don't know BDSM terminology and 2) gimp has other connotations so it's not even obvious that was intended and 3) most people aren't terminally online and 100% don't care as long as the program works.
I've never had a problem sharing it. And no one outside tech has ever brought up BDSM when I tell them about the program or help them install it.
Sigh. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
An extremely conservative church group is perhaps the worst place to try to figure this out; y'all will self-censor naturally.
Anyway, I teach IT, in a department -- shared with Communications -- and can absolutely assure you that this name is a no-go. I get that people don't like "politics" and "optics" and such, but that's what's happening here.
I didn't say no-one gets upset by the name. I said that they're being silly gooses.
If your department wouldn't use free software because of the name, that's very much a them problem. And it's sad that they're so sensitive.
If you don't like the name, you don't have to use the software. Or fork it can call it something more anodyne to your sensibilities.
But no. You want everyone to cater to sensitive people. And thus, myself and others are here to say your comment is annoying when this comes up every thread that GIMP is mentioned.
This is something that non-english speakers have long learned to live with. It is due time that everybody accepts that some words will sound funny to them. In french, for example, "bit" means "penis". This creates quite a stir when you teach computer science to kids. Yet nobody says that computer science is a no-go!
The cool thing about life is that, we don't have to get over it. Instead we can advocate for change. And there's literally nothing you can do about it lol.
Another cool thing about open source is that I can do that while still trying to affect change in the core repo :D
There's really no "shut up and go away" that you can give me that will work, because you aren't some grand FOSS arbiter, you're just some rando on the internet like me.
Eh. Where I work they probably wouldn't care about the BDSM aspects but they are pretty sensitive to ableist slurs, which is primarily why I recommend Photopea instead of GIMP when they need to do Photoshop-ish things.
Thanks for the clarification (as well as the suggestion of looking at the urban dictionary, in the other comment).
My point is that when you say:
> Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings
This refers solely to the tiny percent of the world where people are native english speakers. Elsewhere, it already means the image processing software, if anything at all.
Anyone whose native language is english who's seen "Pulp Fiction", or hasnt been under a rock, or older than a young teen would have encountered the term or concept
As a french, the first and only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word "gimp" is the software, not the kink. It was shared a few weeks ago in my company chat because someone wanted to do a photo edit and absolutely no one even made any semblance of joke related to it
I'd argue that GIMP reclaimed the word for a better meaning. Consider how the word lame has lost its derogatory impact. Googling "gimp" gives me only results about the program. Changing the name now would dilute decades of brand recognition and confuse users, especially those in non-English communities.
I think the sunk cost into branding is the right take here; my 2¢. Gimp is still niche, and will never be used the same way people say Photoshop when referring to any general photo editing. It will take quite a few more years of transient language and lots of success for that unrealistic outcome.
I think they should just rename it as IMP.
The gnu is implied. Richard Stallman might complain it should always be called Gnu IMP (New Imp), which is fine.
I just treat it as an acronym, as do the current developers.
The original founders of the project aren't the ones at the helm currently and the GNU Image Manipulation Program acronym took over from whatever pun it was a long time ago already.
You might like krita better but maybe it is an insult or genital part name in someone else language but you might never know. It happens to so many products. The Toyota MR2 really sound in french like you are calling someone an asshole which is the reason they called it simply MR in that particular market, while an audi etron sounded like audi feces. All this to say that naming is hard and you can never please everyone.
People should really relax and not take personally what has been an acronym for most of the project's life.
There was an effort to rename it to Glimpse, with non-zero community and developer support, also solving a few common complaints about the user interface. It ultimately resulted in a dead fork, disproving not one but two hypotheses.
It's certainly not all that much of an Adobe killer in places where English isn't a first language. And where English is only a second language, the software is the first thing that comes to mind, by far. "Those letters also have a different use in English" comes at a distant second. To second language English speakers (and perhaps even to first language speakers in some regions, but that's pure speculation on my side), that knowledge is more like odd trivia about the software than a hindrance to adaption.
Because I believe in the higher goal of free and open source software, which is more or less the same as the belief that knowledge should be shared -- and the space that GIMP occupies is one that I think a great deal of people would (have benefitted from) if it were to be disrupted from Adobe.
No, I don't believe in hiding good software that can help a lot of people under a secret rock.
I'm sure any project with a stupid name cannot survive. Take, for example, git. The name is a literal insult. github? Come on, like "a place where gits meet"? This is ridiculous! How would you expect anyone who is not a git to teach about it? Use it in a serious enterprise setting?
At the same time, GIMP is remarkably not-geared at serious designers/non-codey folk.
A simple fix would be to ask professionals using the Adobe suite what they would like in an open source tool that could get them to switch. Viewed at from outside, Adobe may appear like a multi-billion dollar moat of focus on prosumer products.
Viewer from as a user, Adobe's software has bugs and inefficiencies that would get the average open source product shredded in the comments. It is ludicrous that Adobe still charges for such bad Ux.
Of the top of my head, I'd say GIMP could get a headstart on Adobe if its builders added:
- n00b user Ux option
- Single panel modes for color correction with all settings in the form of a list of sliders (like lightroom)
- Seamless vector/PDF editing so you don't need to bounce between 3 different softwares
- Good UI for an InDesign competitor (this is a moat that Canva could easily crush if it added a few more options - but it's still worth building). Automatic layout (would really only need to follow a few simple rules - don't overhang text, match formatting, worship whitespace so the user doesn't have to break everything to add it back in).
As tradition, the developers see themselves as gods on earth who cannot be given any sort of feedback without hurting their ego.
Many other open source tools are beloved and used despite their flaws. Gimp is not built for anyone who isn't truly invested in it, making it a niche piece of software.
And the direction of 20 years of a software can tell what kind of contributions would be acceptable for people. I don't think anyone coming in a redoing the whole UI would well accepted, given how little care is given to the same old feedback.
As is tradition, all threads about open source talk about how great alternatives to commercial tools they happen to be, and how we should all shame ourselves only by thinking in using commercial software, without any consideration why we use them in first place.
Effectively what I was going to say. People are way too hung up on making open source software into a moral crusade that they completely blind themselves to the legitimate complaints about gaps between the open source and commercial options. They will say something like "well I don't need that feature" or "I never noticed a problem with that" and just overall get very defensive instead of simply acknowledging that the use cases of others may be different or that they have different tolerances for quirks in the software.
Fact of life: those who never do a thing, so never do something wrong, easily criticize those who actually do things, because of course, they don’t do all perfectly, and do make mistakes.
I don't know... it seems to me that most of the complaints about Gimp come from people who actually use it, because people who never use it wouldn't have anything to complain about.
It also seems odd to assert that non-contributors have no right to complain on a forum where most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making.
>> most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making
I certainly see it very differently, or I would not lose time here. Indeed here is full of makers and doers. People that did things, open source, or founded a company, or something else. Also lots of knowledgeable people. Of course, is some share of charlatans, specially in medical topics, is a show… but in general I do learn here.
I think you can “criticize” if you are not contributing, but form is important. One thing is to say “I don’t like it, you shouldn’t use it” another is “I use it, and I would love feature XY”
I actually use it. I don't mind the keybindings, they make more sense than Photoshop's or Krita's to me.
The complains are from people that want Photoshop for free and Gimp is not that.
I use it almost daily in website content creation. Sure there are quirks, but it's a completely free image editor that can do nearly everything I need. No complaints from me.
I made gimp tutorials in spanish, courses for teachers and demos, twenty years ago. Also Sodipodi an Audacity. I have been downvoted, but there are not enough downvoted that make me change the comments I heard and read for this year's: keybindings and CMYK and pantone, these two last from people who will never paper printed their designs.
This software has been around for almost 30 years now and is always sold as this photoshop killer and praised by open-source zealots. It's become like a religion, they can't take constructive criticism, they don't listen to feedback and if you say anything bad, oh it's easy to criticize. But sometimes a piece of software is just bad in many different ways, and over promising and trying to gaslight users into believing it's a suitable commercial software replacement is dishonest and results in a frustrating experience for newcomers.
I don't see how saying "I wish GIMP had X" is "putting shit on it unconstructively". It's a feature suggestion, whether it's one that's doable given the project's resources or not.
I'd say that "if you don't like it just fork it" approach has dealt way more damage to the reputation of OSS outside of programmer circles than people repeatedly asking for features or improvements.
This is posted every time this software comes up here. I don't know where you people are from, but in my dialect (Eastern US, Gen Z) "gimp" is just not a particularly rude word. It's used primarily as a verb, meaning "to reduce in efficacy, to hamper." Obviously it has it's noun definition too, bit if you think that has anything to do with the lack of adoption of this software you're kidding yourself, you gits.
In places where people speak the other flavours of English, reading the name goes a bit like this:
The first thing that comes to mind is a slang term for someone who is physically disabled or limps. The second thing is that it refers to an insult (someone weak or foolish). Then one starts to wonder if it's a bondage reference... unless one is given additional context, one can never get to a design tool out of this. You wouldn't want people to overhear you say it and misunderstand the situation.
> You wouldn't want people to overhear you say it and misunderstand the situation.
Misunderstand what? Painting with GIMP?
It's an acronym. Maybe I'm completely socially inept, but I don't see at all how it would be embarrassing to explain even to close family that I'm using GNU Image Manipulation Program. People are not going to overhear me and think I'm editing images with someone disabled or wearing a ball gag and straitjacket. It just doesn't happen outside Jim Carrey movies.
Then, when the announcement of the name change is on the HN frontpage, tens of HNers will post their anger "the name was already well-known, this is a marketing disaster!! They should know better!"
You're laughing but when I worked on a search engine, it was a serious question which videos should we display if the search query is just "BBC".
The prudent approach prevailed for a hundred different reasons but online user metrics weren't one of them. Apparently people were not very fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation, especially outside of the angloshpere.
Why would it be? I can't think of a single meaning of BBC which translates to an insult. GIMP on the other hand has more than one meanings as an insult (not even an acronym).
Definitely came after the original BBC being established, and definitely is orders of magnitude less known than the sexual slang variant. So yeah, the Gimp comparison doesn't stand, at all.
Describing one’s … favourite desert? (HN is American so not sure we can say the word here) doesn’t constitute an insult - people say it all the time irl. But you’re also right that BBC wouldn’t be a good name for a design tool either.
Naming things is hard, someone should setup a focus group :)
From what I gather, the people running the project don't mind the name, and that is basically to what this boils down to. I too think it's a stupid name, and that the project would be better off with a rename, but if being less "idiotic" or whatever is not the project goal, then they are no so idiotic after all, no? Idiotic would be to self-sabotage with the name, like failure to get into app stores because of policy or something, and still not changing the name, or trying to fight the perception of "gimp" as a word, or anything like that. But overall, I think situation is settled and the people running the show are consistent.
Side question : can an LLM which nas no idea of how to write plugins for Gimp ingest this page (and the links to the C api and Python api) and write code by itself ?
> As with GIMP 2.10, GIMP 3.0 ships with a Python interpreter embedded and will not use the system Python.
This is great and I wish this was the same with other tools, like Kicad, Freecad and Inkscape.
You kind of get that sort of thing for free if you use Nix as your package manager, along with home-manager - check the link below for more info
https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/introduction/
True, but this only helps a small fraction of the application’s userbase.
Doesn't Inkscape use its own python? I feel like I've found its python a couple times when searching for venvs on windows
For me on Arch Linux, Inkscape definitely doesn’t ship with its own Python. and its source code suggests to me [0] that it shells out to any Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or shell) that it can find on the PATH.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/5c4c6d116dae5250...
It probably ships with python on some platforms. Pretty sure it does on Windows.
But it does not really have a python API. Most (all?) extensions that ship with Inkscape are written in python, and it comes with some base classes and helper modules to make those extensions. But the "API" is basically "we send the current document to the extension's stdin, and whatever comes out as stdout becomes the new document". The extension, written in Python or something else, is responsible for handling all the quirks of SVG (a mix of subsets of two or more of the SVG specs) and (the current version of) Inkscape's additions to SVG.
It is quite painful. I have maintained a couple of third-party extensions written in python since back in Inkscape 0.99.x days (ca 2007). Had to do several annoying major rewrites. Since there is no real API you depend on whatever happens to be in those helper classes, rarely documented and never stable. One of my extension, as do some of the first-party extensions, have to rely on launching Inkscape as a sub-process to perform some work, since there is no way to call in to the running Inkscape. If there was a real API you could have functions to call to query about the boundaries of objects, and other functions to apply changes to objects, that could use internal implementations that are already existing and that can do those things. But the way it works now (and always worked in Inkscape) is that you have to take care of everything yourself, more or less, maybe helped by some of the included helpers if you are lucky to find something that does something similar to what you want to do.
Pretty much done with this. I stopped officially supporting new Inksape versions. I just tell users that the next time Inkscape messes with their not-really-API my extensions will be dead. I can still run them with old Inkscape in some virtual machine. Maybe I will re-implement everything if I find an application that has strong backwards-compatibility goals.
Oh, that's kind of terrible.
I had assumed there would be an API to let you do stuff with the DOM and call into some of the functions inkscape itself uses.
FreeCAD actually uses python for scripting. The console is a python repl.
https://wiki.freecad.org/Python
Well the question is if it relies on the system Python, or if it ships its own version.
Kicad brings its own Python and is fully interfaceable.
But would that make it so that it's impossible to install/access other libraries?
Blender has done this since Dec 2000.
Gdb
I'm patiently waiting for resynthesizer to be ported. Then I will make the move to 3.0. I've used GIMP exclusively as my image editor for the past two decades and it has fulfilled my needs for web development. I really don't get all the gripe around it. It's one of the most valuable free programs on my PC. Sure, it does take time and possibly customization to get yourself a comfortable workflow. But once you get it down, you can do basically everything you need with keyboard shortcuts and blaze thru editing really quickly.
I think it's already been ported, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer...
Thank you for that link! I've installed 3.0.0-RC3 and so far I'm pleased. I've noticed a few new behaviors like moving multiple layers now with shift instead of the previous layer link.
3.0 felt a little weird for the first day or two, but as someone who likewise has used Gimp mostly for web stuff for (almost) 20 years, I really like 3.0 compared to 2.x so far. Text is slightly more finicky but way more powerful, for instance.
I tried and tried, but just couldn't make the switch. Krita made it much easier and now I'm 100% Krita.
I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing.
I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great.
I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.
If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.
I would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope.
For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.
The few people I know doing visual design still balk at a program that lacks native CMYK editing. Honestly I'm still skeptical about the significant improvements made for 3.0 due to the project's history.
I remember CMYK being the most common complaint (after the UI) 20 years ago, too. And at the time the entire GIMP project insisted that you never needed it and RGB was good enough. By coders for coders, indeed.
For what it's worth, a full CMYK mode is on my personal to-do list after the final 3.0 release (though 3.0 RC has had CMYK import/export and soft-proofing for a long while). I made a prototype implementation earlier (https://twitter.com/CmykStudent/status/1618261982628704259) and with all the color space improvements made since, it should be even easier to prototype now.
Out of curiosity, what improvements in 3.0 RC are you skeptical of? If you're willing to share, it'd be helpful feedback for us. :)
I don’t know. RGB was good enough. For every 1 person out there digitally processing art for a children’s book, which is the only piece of printed media I could think of whose lifecycle does not feature immediate disposal, there are 19 who would love their HDR iPhone photos to look right, so if anything, they should be worrying about P3.
This I feel is a fair complaint, I have seen it many times but I have to admit I am not a visual designer so I do not really understand it. Allow me to enumerate.
rgb is a larger color space than cmyk, that is to say the colors that cmyk can represent are a subset of rgb.
You are doing the work on an rgb monitor. what does having the illusion that you are working in cmyk get you? just use a cmyk color picker
but most damning, industrial printers are not CMYK, they are spot color, that is, they will be filled with essentially random primary colors chosen to best fit the final print. When you do need very fine control over the final color, you don't want a cmyk aware system you want a spot color aware system. And even then, you will only get close, requiring many test prints to validate the final result.
Irrespective of technical merit, if your printing shop requires a CMYK PDF, they requires a CMYK PDF.
You're not going to argue and discuss the merit of such and such color spaces with them; you're going to switch tools so that you get them to print your wedding invitations.
One of the big reasons for the rewrite, GEGL brings CMYK (and many other things).
Affinity seems like it works through Wine/Proton
Same here. Affinity is great, it has some quirk and some basic features are scattered around the UI without seemingly much thought.
But every time I have to use Gimp is just a pain, feels like going back in time.
For such a complex tool, UX is and will always remain king. That's why many people miss even something as simple as the Mac Preview tool, it does its job nicely and neatly. It doesn't do much but for basic stuff is quick and straightforward.
It's not made for coders, it's made for the benefit of whomever uses it, and many people use and bundle it as well. I do understand the issues that people are experiencing with it UX-wise, but the answer to that is not that it's being made for coders, it's that it's an open source project, and as such, it has other incentives, than giving the best UX possible. Also, since it's open source and not for-profit, it has other circumstances than proprietary projects do. For-profit projects live and die on profit, and for b2c profit, you have to have good UX (like Affinity), or for b2b, good connections (like Cerner, or Windows). What open source projects need is being able to hold their main contributor's attention and dedication to the project. Entirely different ballgame. And, yes, very different UX as well. I also stopped fiddling with GIMP - what I do I can do 10 times faster in f** Photopea of all software.
We actually set up a UX repo to better track issues with UI/UX, and to get feedback from designers and other members of the community. If anyone's interested in helping, feel free to post issues and discuss on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues
That is very nice, thanks for linking it!
>for coders
https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/01/27/gimp-team-zemarmot-fosd...
Gimp is being used,and improved along the way, to make an animation movie. Jehan (scenarist, technical) of that movie is also a core maintainer.
Gimp is nearing 30 years old, and it has been used for at most a handful of animation movies. I think, regarding its usage, that this is more of an outlier, than a main purpose of the software. So I don't think that this example refutes OP's point.
and I think otherwise https://girinstud.io/news/2018/04/zemarmot-main-contributor-...
I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders. Being made for coders is a bad claim as well, at most, it's a jab at its user interface, which, I think, is no worse then Photoshop's by the way, it's just that people are familiar with one, and the not the other.
A good refutal of the for-coders claim would be that it's one of the default image editor most commonly included with major Linux distributions. That's a much larger thing than it being just made for coders.
> I do know about the movie, and having one (upcoming even) movie being made about GIMP doesn't say anything about its usage, or it not being made for coders.
Yes it does because ZeMarmot producers are the main contributors to Gimp's code.
GIMP's initial release was in June 2, 1998.
ZeMarmot's announcement was in 05 February 2015.
The GIMP was an at least 17 year old software project, when the animated movie was announced.
Of the two main GIMP maintainers, one of them works on ZeMarmot.
What this all says is that yes, there is an animation movie 10 years in the making, by some of the people who also work on the GIMP project. It says nothing about GIMP being made for any particular purpose, either or not for coders, and/or for animation or for visual creatives in particular.
s/about GIMP/with GIMP/
They could start with a name change.
Yes, I suggest they change it to... The Pimp
^ when you use 100% of your brain
Pixel Image Manipulation Program
> They could start with a name change.
Yes. Peacock will be fine. It is a wonderful bird.
Though Photopea is already an online Photoshop clone and sounds a bit similar?
(It’s also pretty decent. My usual go to for stuff I can’t justify spinning up an Adobe VM for…)
As I've said exhaustively before, this is also reflected in the stupid stubbornness in not changing the name.
I firmly believe they could have eaten Adobe's lunch decades ago, but I can't recommend something that may be an ableist slur, and definitely means something that is the opposite of "skilled."
Childish and disappointing.
gimp became way less annoying once i discovered the command pallette (the forward slash key), you can pretty much do everything with it. i even use it to switch tools sometimes sinces its easier than trying to look through all the tool icons or having to long press them
It was easier when the icons had color and were not grouped into multiple tools behind one icon.
You can change both if you like (it's one of the first things I do whenever I install GIMP on new systems)! In 2.10, you can change the icons in Preferences under the Icon Theme section, and remove tool groups in the Toolbox section.
In 3.0 it's even easier, as both options are available in the Personalize tab of the Welcome Dialogue. I'm hoping this will help make that feature more discoverable. :)
Thank you! This comment made my day.
Thanks for that - I've been using GIMP regularly more than two decades and didn't know about that trick!
In a recent attempt to use Gimp for a small project, a few features I found were lacking:
1. Viewing the layer boundaries of all layers. Very helpful in seeing the total layout of the project.
2. Select multiple layers and do operations like move/align.
I think both of those are resolved in GIMP 3. You can multi-select layers, and when you do it shows the total boundary for all selected layers. If you're willing to try it out, feel free to share if there are other issues you'd like us to look at!
You can move multiple layers if they are in a layer group, at least in gimp 2.10
The group also shows the outline of the bounding box of all layers in it, although that's not quite the same as the layer outlines ofc.
Try Krita, it’s free, opensource and what gimp should have been all along.
Different focus.
Krita is for free drawing, gimp is a photoshop replacement.
I do agree they probably would benefit from trying Krita.
I often hear that Krita has a different focus, but does it lack anything that GIMP has? (disregarding obscure features like bell pepper brush)
Yes it does.
I am mostly using krita for painting and gimp for general editing and composing usually so I haven't double-checked every single feature on both but I have one example: krita can open a pdf but cannot save it and doesn't even have a "print" functionality. Found out when trying to sign a contract with krita on my convertible thinkpad. Gimp makes it a breeze in comparison.
I am sure there are other features missing in both directions. It is great to have choice.
I haven't missed anything in my usage, I just wish it had photoshop's easy automation tools where I could record and save my actions but Krita has scripting support so I'll learn that eventually.
(And I'm sure someone has ported the pepper brush as well!)
Krita is a better Photoshop than GIMP, in my opinion. I don't care what its intended usage is.
I switched from Photoshop CS to Gimp, and it took me 5 years at the time :) I kept on working on CS for that time, and ran gimp on the side on a VM running linux (it was the crunchbang distribution, a cool debian distrib).
Gimp's Dotfiles on Linux are really well done, once your settings are done, you keep them forever (i barely changed them now for a decade).
I was really used to Photoshop (used it from photoshop 4 to CS) ; a good idea would be to change Gimp's bindings to the one you have on photoshop.
Some stuff won't work as well as Photoshop, the best is to experiment, and find alternatives maybe not in the most optimal way.
I used to produce pictures, and then tried to do the same thing on Gimp, using the same source files. Stopping when I was stuck, trying to find other ways to work.
It isn't alternative to photoshop though, what about darktable (https://www.darktable.org/)? I could be wrong but it is more of an alternative to lightroom afaik. Have you used?
Thanks for the suggestion. I've never been really into the "catalog" apps, starting from itunes. Always been more of a winamp guy ;) I like to browse my files from the explorer and not having to deal with a software to navigate or a software to catalog files and corrupting my filetree.
I've been using gimp since one week and so far, once you start trying to understand what's going on (something I never allowed it since 20 years I've tried), it's really not that bad.
Darktable may have a catalog, but like you, I've never seen the value in that. It's primary purpose is as a RAW editor, and it's pretty good at that. Highly recommend it as a first pass for any digital photography. That, or Rawtherapee.
There is also rawtherapee.
I just want to draw lines and geometric shapes, without having to deal with paths, like in any other sane graphical program.
Has this been finally sorted out?
Inkscape is an SVG editor. It's in the name. I for one love having a tool with semantics so close to the format, instead of dealing with Illustrator's nonsense. Sometimes Illustrator is the right tool, but as a web developer, Inkscape is the only sane tool for manipulating SVG.
The point is this a solved problem in every other paint program out there since Xerox, no one is asking for drawing SVG.
But it never gets sorted out due to whatever ideologic feeling Gimp developers have with offering only paths as option.
My post was irrelevant anyway, somehow I misread and thought you were replying to a post about Inkscape. Sorry about that!
No issues, I imagined just as much.
You might like Pinta. It's my favorite no nonsense image editor for basic drawing and quickly changing stuff. Not for big projects, just editing a few pixels, resizing, brightness, cropping, painting, flood filling, basically classic MS Paint but with layers.
It's a fork of Paint.NET, which happens to be my favorite image editor on Windows. The Mono-based port is a bit flaky and crashes sometimes, but the Gimp UX is just unusable for me, so Pinta it is. I tried gimp many times, but I just end up reading forums and often the program either can't do the small stuff I want, or it takes 5 minutes of clicks.
Actually I eventually moved into Paint.NET, and I am mostly on Windows/macOS nowadays.
Thanks for the hint, tough.
Exciting to be trying something new!
Curious what drove the switch? You say macOS had been very frustrating lately, anything that made it particularly so?
I've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around.
My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems :
- Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird)
- Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu
- Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock
- SMB compatibility is hell
- Finder is hell
- ...
Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works".
The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.
> I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe.
GIMP is for general graphics stuff. Try DarkTable, which was made specifically for photography editing and is very good at it.
The UI improved years ago. And they revamped the UI in Gimp 3.0 and latest InkScape.
Serious question: Has anyone proficient in Photoshop given GIMP a proper go and come out the other side wanting to use it?
I worked in prepress, so pretty good an Photoshop, and vastly prefer GIMP. The problems with GIMP are technical, there are some necessary things for some jobs that it simply hasn't been able to do, but I'm seeing a lot of work being done on them.
The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough.
Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that.
GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
> it only gains features, never loses them
The article is about losing features due to incompatibility of plugins. Perhaps you refer to some more abstract open source concept?
We're in the process of updating our documentation to help people port their existing plug-ins and scripts to 3.0: https://testing.developer.gimp.org/resource/writing-a-plug-i...
Now that the API is stable for 3.0, we're hoping more people will feel comfortable updating to it.
Gimp 3.0 is still in release candidate and nobody is forced to move to gimp 3.0 until their favorite plugins are ready.
Additionally it is trivial to have both installed on the same machine and there haven't been breaking changes in the xcf format as far as I know so you can open the same file on both version without issues.
That was my experience 20 years ago.
Photoshop wasn't the photoshop of today but neither was gimp.
seconded. i used a lot of photoshop CS2 and CS3, as well as gimp from the same time period. for the most part i felt they were on-par with each other at the time.
there's https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.
Isn’t it time to start providing wasm plugin support in most apps or too early?
It is already a thing in Typst.
How many layers of indirection do you need?!
I wonder if this Gimp stuff can be used to work with 3D model files like TMD and TMD_TOON files.
I tried 3.0 RC2 the other day and discovered that the new UI is much less space efficient. It imported my panel layout from 2.10 (which I spent a long time getting just right), and I had to completely rearrange it to get it to fit on a 1080px tall monitor. Very frustrating.
Also, it doesn't detect my drawing tablet.
Hi! Would you be willing to post more details on your drawing tablet (either here or on our issue tracker https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity). We've gotten a lot of reports that tablets have better support in 3.0, so if there's some regression we'd definitely like to get that fixed.
Are there specific areas of the UI that are less space efficient? One of the big changes was switching our GUI library to GTK3, which is suppose to scale better on HiDPI screens. But we had to recreate our theming system as a result, so if we need to tweak something we can try.
I recently moved from an old Ubuntu MATE to Debian Trixie Cinnamon with 2.0 UI scaling and had the same problem. I overrode this with the environment variable GDK_SCALE=1 for GIMP and was able to more-or-less duplicate the previous compactness.
The theme might have helped too - I am using Yaru-cinnamon-dark. Some themes are truly wonky, with objects changing size and forcing re-layout on hover. WTaF that should not even be possible!
a bit (un)related but is it somehow possible to resize text layers without pixelating them on Gimp? i stopped searching years ago
Will continue to say it, this piece of software that could be a mainstream huge deal, a straight-up Adobe killer, will never do this unless it changes its name.
I've mostly given up hope on this, but it's still wild that people who work on the software just seem to very stubbornly not understand this.
Whether you want to blame it on ableism, or perhaps simply "you should name your software after something/someone skilled or professional, not literally the opposite," you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it.
Luckily, Krita's here and for better or worse does the AI stuff.
That's probably true. But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal.
It serves a valuable community function by protecting the community from corporate interests, non-technical bike-shedding, and overload by "bug" reports that are actually just the user not being technical enough to use the tool properly.
Edit: Also FWIW, I've had no problem introducing GIMP to church groups and in various professional settings.
Double edit: since you mention schools, I should also add that I taught my wife GIMP and she had no problem sharing it in her school (US public high school).
> But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor…
Some folks who are neither prudish or humorless want to see the project and its contributors succeed to the degree that alternatives like Photopea has, or as Blender has in the 3D space. The project will continue to limp along until the name is changed to something without negative connotations in English-speaking populations.
You can fork it, rename to something like "Glimpse" and see the adoption skyrocket. Surely the success is just around the corner. Oh wait a minute
Point taken — the name is just one of many issues between GIMP and Blender-like success. But there are also open source projects like Inkscape, which enjoyed success in part because of a rechristening that eliminated the headwinds of previous bad names.
Hey don't be unfair to them, they also tried to collect donations for changing the name.
> offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal
I agree, and to an extent laud it, but it also means keeping GIMP an old-school hacker project.
> his piece of software (...) will never do this unless it changes its name.
Why?
Honestly, why?
As a non-native English speaker (like the vast majority of people in this planet), the word "gimp" to me means "the free software image processing program". If I search google, duckduckgo, bing, whatever, the entire first page of results refers to that very program. Digging deeper, I start to find some references to the Pulp Fiction movie, where a minor character is named like that. I remember that character, but in my language it was called by a different name. Is that all?
Is there any other meaning to this word? If so, it must be so obscure as to be completely irrelevant.
Please, take into account that most English speakers are not native speakers, and many words will have a different meaning to us. English as a lingua franca may be comfortable to native speakers, but it also means that it's no longer yours.
The name of the program does not seem to be a serious issue for its adoption. Now, if you want to talk about its user interface... I don't think it does, either (but I may be open to discussion). I have taught my kids to do simple image processing tasks in gimp: copy-pasting parts of an image into another, removing some stuff, blurring, simple layer operations, etc. Anyhow, they got it in a few minutes. Important to say: they are not at all tech-savvy (to my dismay! but this is another story). If they use adobe or krita they will surely find it slightly confusing at the beginning, but no big deal either. Just like a regular person moving from photoshop to gimp.
A gimp is a man dressed in a bondage suit used for BDSM sexual roleplay. Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings. The GIMP software might as well have the name of a curse word like fuck or shit as far as its appropriateness in public discourse goes.
Literally, get over it. Even my (extremely conservative) church group doesn't have an issue with it. 1) because most people don't know BDSM terminology and 2) gimp has other connotations so it's not even obvious that was intended and 3) most people aren't terminally online and 100% don't care as long as the program works.
I've never had a problem sharing it. And no one outside tech has ever brought up BDSM when I tell them about the program or help them install it.
Sigh. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
An extremely conservative church group is perhaps the worst place to try to figure this out; y'all will self-censor naturally.
Anyway, I teach IT, in a department -- shared with Communications -- and can absolutely assure you that this name is a no-go. I get that people don't like "politics" and "optics" and such, but that's what's happening here.
I didn't say no-one gets upset by the name. I said that they're being silly gooses.
If your department wouldn't use free software because of the name, that's very much a them problem. And it's sad that they're so sensitive.
If you don't like the name, you don't have to use the software. Or fork it can call it something more anodyne to your sensibilities.
But no. You want everyone to cater to sensitive people. And thus, myself and others are here to say your comment is annoying when this comes up every thread that GIMP is mentioned.
This is something that non-english speakers have long learned to live with. It is due time that everybody accepts that some words will sound funny to them. In french, for example, "bit" means "penis". This creates quite a stir when you teach computer science to kids. Yet nobody says that computer science is a no-go!
The cool thing about life is that, we don't have to get over it. Instead we can advocate for change. And there's literally nothing you can do about it lol.
Fork it then.
Another cool thing about open source is that I can do that while still trying to affect change in the core repo :D
There's really no "shut up and go away" that you can give me that will work, because you aren't some grand FOSS arbiter, you're just some rando on the internet like me.
Eh. Where I work they probably wouldn't care about the BDSM aspects but they are pretty sensitive to ableist slurs, which is primarily why I recommend Photopea instead of GIMP when they need to do Photoshop-ish things.
Thanks for the clarification (as well as the suggestion of looking at the urban dictionary, in the other comment).
My point is that when you say:
> Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings
This refers solely to the tiny percent of the world where people are native english speakers. Elsewhere, it already means the image processing software, if anything at all.
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Or many, many other things (https://www.wordnik.com/words/gimp).
yeah well.. says more about those who even bring that up... most people probably dont know that
Anyone who's seen "Pulp Fiction", or hasnt been under a rock, or older than a young teen would have encountered the term or concept
Anyone whose native language is english who's seen "Pulp Fiction", or hasnt been under a rock, or older than a young teen would have encountered the term or concept
As a french, the first and only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word "gimp" is the software, not the kink. It was shared a few weeks ago in my company chat because someone wanted to do a photo edit and absolutely no one even made any semblance of joke related to it
I don't think more than half of the world population have been under a rock.
It's both a pejorative term for disabled people, and a specific type of bondage fetish.
I'd argue that GIMP reclaimed the word for a better meaning. Consider how the word lame has lost its derogatory impact. Googling "gimp" gives me only results about the program. Changing the name now would dilute decades of brand recognition and confuse users, especially those in non-English communities.
I think the sunk cost into branding is the right take here; my 2¢. Gimp is still niche, and will never be used the same way people say Photoshop when referring to any general photo editing. It will take quite a few more years of transient language and lots of success for that unrealistic outcome.
I think they should just rename it as IMP. The gnu is implied. Richard Stallman might complain it should always be called Gnu IMP (New Imp), which is fine.
I just treat it as an acronym, as do the current developers.
The original founders of the project aren't the ones at the helm currently and the GNU Image Manipulation Program acronym took over from whatever pun it was a long time ago already.
You might like krita better but maybe it is an insult or genital part name in someone else language but you might never know. It happens to so many products. The Toyota MR2 really sound in french like you are calling someone an asshole which is the reason they called it simply MR in that particular market, while an audi etron sounded like audi feces. All this to say that naming is hard and you can never please everyone.
People should really relax and not take personally what has been an acronym for most of the project's life.
There was an effort to rename it to Glimpse, with non-zero community and developer support, also solving a few common complaints about the user interface. It ultimately resulted in a dead fork, disproving not one but two hypotheses.
It's certainly not all that much of an Adobe killer in places where English isn't a first language. And where English is only a second language, the software is the first thing that comes to mind, by far. "Those letters also have a different use in English" comes at a distant second. To second language English speakers (and perhaps even to first language speakers in some regions, but that's pure speculation on my side), that knowledge is more like odd trivia about the software than a hindrance to adaption.
Doesn't seem to have caused a problem for Git. Probably didn't for LAME, either, granted MP3 seems to be falling by the wayside now.
> you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it.
Why exactly is it bad? It's not that all software have to be loved and recommended by everyone, opinions differ and it's normal.
If for you the name matters more than the substance then well maybe you're not the target audience, so be it.
Because I believe in the higher goal of free and open source software, which is more or less the same as the belief that knowledge should be shared -- and the space that GIMP occupies is one that I think a great deal of people would (have benefitted from) if it were to be disrupted from Adobe.
No, I don't believe in hiding good software that can help a lot of people under a secret rock.
It's not about the name it's about pace of development. It's extremely slow since they don't see a need for more backing like let's say Blender.
I'm sure any project with a stupid name cannot survive. Take, for example, git. The name is a literal insult. github? Come on, like "a place where gits meet"? This is ridiculous! How would you expect anyone who is not a git to teach about it? Use it in a serious enterprise setting?
...Ah no, wait a moment...
As is tradition, all threads about an open source project must be kicked off with non-contributers putting shit on it unconstructively.
At the same time, GIMP is remarkably not-geared at serious designers/non-codey folk.
A simple fix would be to ask professionals using the Adobe suite what they would like in an open source tool that could get them to switch. Viewed at from outside, Adobe may appear like a multi-billion dollar moat of focus on prosumer products.
Viewer from as a user, Adobe's software has bugs and inefficiencies that would get the average open source product shredded in the comments. It is ludicrous that Adobe still charges for such bad Ux.
Of the top of my head, I'd say GIMP could get a headstart on Adobe if its builders added:
- n00b user Ux option
- Single panel modes for color correction with all settings in the form of a list of sliders (like lightroom)
- Seamless vector/PDF editing so you don't need to bounce between 3 different softwares
- Good UI for an InDesign competitor (this is a moat that Canva could easily crush if it added a few more options - but it's still worth building). Automatic layout (would really only need to follow a few simple rules - don't overhang text, match formatting, worship whitespace so the user doesn't have to break everything to add it back in).
if it's so easy, fork and build it :)
"Seamless vector/PDF editing" seems especially easy.
As tradition, the developers see themselves as gods on earth who cannot be given any sort of feedback without hurting their ego.
Many other open source tools are beloved and used despite their flaws. Gimp is not built for anyone who isn't truly invested in it, making it a niche piece of software.
And the direction of 20 years of a software can tell what kind of contributions would be acceptable for people. I don't think anyone coming in a redoing the whole UI would well accepted, given how little care is given to the same old feedback.
As is tradition, all threads about open source talk about how great alternatives to commercial tools they happen to be, and how we should all shame ourselves only by thinking in using commercial software, without any consideration why we use them in first place.
Effectively what I was going to say. People are way too hung up on making open source software into a moral crusade that they completely blind themselves to the legitimate complaints about gaps between the open source and commercial options. They will say something like "well I don't need that feature" or "I never noticed a problem with that" and just overall get very defensive instead of simply acknowledging that the use cases of others may be different or that they have different tolerances for quirks in the software.
Fact of life: those who never do a thing, so never do something wrong, easily criticize those who actually do things, because of course, they don’t do all perfectly, and do make mistakes.
Also remember for million time they will never use it because it doesn't have exact keys as their proprietary contents kidnapper software.
I don't know... it seems to me that most of the complaints about Gimp come from people who actually use it, because people who never use it wouldn't have anything to complain about.
It also seems odd to assert that non-contributors have no right to complain on a forum where most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making.
>> most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making
I certainly see it very differently, or I would not lose time here. Indeed here is full of makers and doers. People that did things, open source, or founded a company, or something else. Also lots of knowledgeable people. Of course, is some share of charlatans, specially in medical topics, is a show… but in general I do learn here.
I think you can “criticize” if you are not contributing, but form is important. One thing is to say “I don’t like it, you shouldn’t use it” another is “I use it, and I would love feature XY”
I actually use it. I don't mind the keybindings, they make more sense than Photoshop's or Krita's to me. The complains are from people that want Photoshop for free and Gimp is not that.
I use it almost daily in website content creation. Sure there are quirks, but it's a completely free image editor that can do nearly everything I need. No complaints from me.
I made gimp tutorials in spanish, courses for teachers and demos, twenty years ago. Also Sodipodi an Audacity. I have been downvoted, but there are not enough downvoted that make me change the comments I heard and read for this year's: keybindings and CMYK and pantone, these two last from people who will never paper printed their designs.
This software has been around for almost 30 years now and is always sold as this photoshop killer and praised by open-source zealots. It's become like a religion, they can't take constructive criticism, they don't listen to feedback and if you say anything bad, oh it's easy to criticize. But sometimes a piece of software is just bad in many different ways, and over promising and trying to gaslight users into believing it's a suitable commercial software replacement is dishonest and results in a frustrating experience for newcomers.
I don't see how saying "I wish GIMP had X" is "putting shit on it unconstructively". It's a feature suggestion, whether it's one that's doable given the project's resources or not.
I'd say that "if you don't like it just fork it" approach has dealt way more damage to the reputation of OSS outside of programmer circles than people repeatedly asking for features or improvements.
Gimp 3 - Duke nukem forever!
RCs are already shipping in Fedora.
It’s time for a new name. “gimp” may be semantically correct but it hardly prepares one for a “friendly and powerful graphics editing tool”.
This is posted every time this software comes up here. I don't know where you people are from, but in my dialect (Eastern US, Gen Z) "gimp" is just not a particularly rude word. It's used primarily as a verb, meaning "to reduce in efficacy, to hamper." Obviously it has it's noun definition too, bit if you think that has anything to do with the lack of adoption of this software you're kidding yourself, you gits.
In places where people speak the other flavours of English, reading the name goes a bit like this:
The first thing that comes to mind is a slang term for someone who is physically disabled or limps. The second thing is that it refers to an insult (someone weak or foolish). Then one starts to wonder if it's a bondage reference... unless one is given additional context, one can never get to a design tool out of this. You wouldn't want people to overhear you say it and misunderstand the situation.
> You wouldn't want people to overhear you say it and misunderstand the situation.
Misunderstand what? Painting with GIMP?
It's an acronym. Maybe I'm completely socially inept, but I don't see at all how it would be embarrassing to explain even to close family that I'm using GNU Image Manipulation Program. People are not going to overhear me and think I'm editing images with someone disabled or wearing a ball gag and straitjacket. It just doesn't happen outside Jim Carrey movies.
Let’s try a scientific experiment. Go to a bar and start calling people GIMP’s and analyze the reactions it receives.
You could make the same argument about GNOME
That deserves a discussion on its own, including the silly foot logo.
What about "Professional Image Manipulation Program"?
Digital Image Correction Kit
Touch-up & Image Transformation Studio
Extraneous and unnecessary words for the sake of satisfying an acronym. Let’s just call it Image Editor or IE for short.
It's fairly idiotic at this stage that this has never been changed. Highly damaging to the products outward appearance.
Then, when the announcement of the name change is on the HN frontpage, tens of HNers will post their anger "the name was already well-known, this is a marketing disaster!! They should know better!"
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Yes but those people would be wrong in this case.
I don't think it's highly damaging. It's an acronym. Is BBC's name highly damaging?
You're laughing but when I worked on a search engine, it was a serious question which videos should we display if the search query is just "BBC".
The prudent approach prevailed for a hundred different reasons but online user metrics weren't one of them. Apparently people were not very fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation, especially outside of the angloshpere.
BBC isn't a great comparison - it's an initialism, not read or said as a word.
I can't think of an acronym example though.
And the embarrassing meaning that some might attribute to "BBC" is also an initialism.
Why would it be? I can't think of a single meaning of BBC which translates to an insult. GIMP on the other hand has more than one meanings as an insult (not even an acronym).
Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_(sexual_slang)
Definitely came after the original BBC being established, and definitely is orders of magnitude less known than the sexual slang variant. So yeah, the Gimp comparison doesn't stand, at all.
Uhhh BBC also stands for something else, and that second meaning is a very common term on the internet.
Describing one’s … favourite desert? (HN is American so not sure we can say the word here) doesn’t constitute an insult - people say it all the time irl. But you’re also right that BBC wouldn’t be a good name for a design tool either.
Naming things is hard, someone should setup a focus group :)
Are you thinking of the Coventry University Netball Team? (again).
From what I gather, the people running the project don't mind the name, and that is basically to what this boils down to. I too think it's a stupid name, and that the project would be better off with a rename, but if being less "idiotic" or whatever is not the project goal, then they are no so idiotic after all, no? Idiotic would be to self-sabotage with the name, like failure to get into app stores because of policy or something, and still not changing the name, or trying to fight the perception of "gimp" as a word, or anything like that. But overall, I think situation is settled and the people running the show are consistent.
Side question : can an LLM which nas no idea of how to write plugins for Gimp ingest this page (and the links to the C api and Python api) and write code by itself ?
If you already understand all the documentation and can prod an LLM in the correct direction every time it does something stupid then probably.
Why not try it yourself? ;)