worked on it since 1998
Been using GIMP since it got too hard to find an updated cracked warez zip file from Limewire.
TBF I think certain feature requests in GIMP have been backlogged for 15 years or so. Like a timeline for animating in, for example.
Timeline for animations in an image manipulator? I thought you have to use Krita for this sort of stuff.
Timeline for animations in an image manipulator?
Yeah, Photoshop has this. Makes it easy to edit GIFs for memes, as GIFs get split into each frame.
Oh wow thanks, I didn’t know that GIMP could do that
https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/export-file-formats.html#gimp-exporting-animations
https://itsfoss.com/make-gif-in-gimp/
Apparently it opens each frame? I will have to try this.
is this some kind of AI upscale of the meme? His skin has a fabric-like texture, uncanny 👀
Sidebar, it’s been interesting to watch the contrast between gimp and blender or even Krita which are truly industry competitive if not industry leaders.
Inkscape too.
HOW DO I DRAW A CIRCLE
the ellipse tool is literally right there.
There is a shape tool you can use to draw shapes, but its more like stamping, I think they recommend krita for actual drawing.
- turn grid on
- use a brush
- use an eraser
- make the brush smaller and click the same spot
Yes because turning a one click action into what is this, 8 precisely accurate clicks? Makes so much sense in a professional workflow.
Gimp is pretty much the epitome of software where “you can do it, but it’s going to be tedious and painful”
Grids have Snapping so its as precise as you set the grid to be. If it has to look professional then I would expect you to use the grid in PS as well. PS is not “one click”, you have to select the ellipse tool, set the options, click the start point, and click the end point.
GNU Image Manipulation Program
I see a lot of whining about the name. Just use the full name if you don’t like the acronym.
Man, respectfully, for those of us constantly in online spaces a logical answer like this seems to make total sense. In reality, that’s ridiculous and totally impractical. And it’s ridiculous when a software program that’s intending to replace a mainstream commercial program doesn’t consider the branding. GIMP has been around for decades and are steadfast about this name, but you are deluding yourself if you truly believe that they wouldn’t have made considerably more progress toward broad adoption if they had a better name.
It’s called gimp cause it’s submissive to Photoshop and covered in rubber or leather bondage
It’s not the name holding them back. As everyone else in here is saying, it’s the UI quirks.
I think it can be more than one thing and the name has never helped.
One mans quirk is another mans standard
Gimp 3 came out this past year and I feel made massive improvements that I use often for my little simple projects but I think everyone still complaining about Gimp 2 because they tried it many years ago and said it sucks and went back to paying adobe.
most comlpains I met is about the name, not program itself.
deleted by creator
Ya I mean it stands for GNU Image manipulation program I think but I guess wouldn’t hurt to have a rename because I don’t think it’s fully a GNU project anymore and branched off iirc?
It’s any kind of handicap or physical disability/deformity
I’ve used GIMP many times. Every time I do, I fight with it for hours, try looking up tutorials for how to do things only to find out that everything is different in the tutorial compared to what is happening in my version of the program, and then I rage quit and use something else.
Sorry but I do not find GIMP usable. Not that I have any interest in the ai clone either. I’ve heard good things about Krita, so next time I need to edit something I’ll be spending some hours learning how to use that.
This.
GIMP may have good functionality (in GIMP 3.2), but it’s a software designed by engineers. Most workflows are more complicated than they would need to be. Sadly, there currently isn’t a real alternative for image manipulation out there currently, so we need to stick with what we have.
Well, there is also Krita and several other good OpenSource Image/painting editors. In between I use also often MiniPaint direct in the Browser, which is pretty complete with all the basics, tools and filters
Krita is a painting and sketching tool and lacks some photo editing capabilities that GIMP has. PhotoCraft is vibe coded (In itself not a bad thing, but many features are incomplete, such as PSD compatibility), I haven’t tested the other ones yet. MiniPaint looks fun, but I’ll need to test it out.
Yes, Krita is in first line an painting tool (profesional level), but also has photo editing and even animation capabilities, enough for most tasks, even RAW format, the flaw of Gimp. I use both, Krita and Gimp are good complementary apps. For vector graphics I’ve enough with Libre Office. And yes, MiniPaint has a misleading name, it’s a very powerfull editor, nothing Mini. Well, it isn’t PS, but way enough for almost all editing tasks, it’s blazing fast (Html5) and ideal for editing something on the go while browsing.
I tend to resort to paint.net
Yes. Yes, you are a joke to me.
:(
I prefer photopea. Completely browser based and ready for anything quick. Haven’t tried anything in depth with it though.
Photopea is really good. It pretty much has all the tools i ever need as someone who had a passion for graphics design/photo editing in their youth but never went pro. It gets shit done for some simple stuff i want to slap together now and then.
But some stuff gets laggy really fast. Like worse than PS CS2 on my Pentium 4 shitbox 20 years ago. I wish we could have Photopea without browser technology in an appimage/flatpak or whatever. It would be perfect.
You named it GIMP. It’s a joke to YOU, too.
A lot of free software has silly names, it’s part of the 80s/90s nerdy computing culture
Google too 🙃
Aww, I remember that. Back when it was fun.
There’s a difference between naming something silly and naming something after a well known fetish
Oh noes! A word!
So you’d use a software called “Child Molester 9000” so long as it’s FOSS and kinda replaces Photoshop?
Paedophilia isn’t a fetish, it’s a psychiatric disorder.
Way to miss the point
No, I got your point. I’m rejecting the comparison because paedophilia isn’t a kink and comparing it to one is harmful.
If you renamed Blender to PUSSYLICKER BOOBINATOR 9000, I’d still use it. It’s a good piece of software for the price of nothing. Before you ask; I’m turbo gay. I’m one of those gays who get turned off by tits.
I do use GIMP from time to time. It’s rare for me to need it. The name doesn’t bother me.
Objectively you are right. A name doesn’t mean anything.
But it’s 2026 - it’s delusional to still view human beings as rational creatures who make decisions or judgments on an objective, logical basis.
If there were an Android app that cured cancer, 20% of patients would still die waiting for an iOS port. The reality is that getting people to accept something en masse means tailoring it to their philistine, banal, pedestrian expectations.
Hell hath no fury like a photographer told to use UX that isn’t literally an 1:1 exact clone of Photoshop UX.
What babies.
wait until you see Lightroom vs Darktable comments :)
Amusingly, I am pretty happy with darktable. The UX is a bit kludgy, but the workflow makes a lot of sense to me. If you’ve used another mainstream RAW processor, like Lightroom, Capture One, or DxO PhotoLab, you’ll quickly be ripping through RAW files once you figure out where the handful of things you’ll frequently use are. Everything I need is supported.
I’ve made a few runs at GIMP over the years, but I’ve given up each time. It’s UI is also kludgy, but the workflows do not make sense to me. They will feel very foreign to someone who cut their teeth in Photoshop like tools. There are a ton of editors that have basically the same workflow as Photoshop. Paint.net is a good example. It’s nowhere near as full featured as Photoshop, but it’s very easy to pick up and run with if you’re familiar with Photoshop.
Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to more major UI/UX changes – there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
Firefox’s incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it’s not “this is demonstrably worse,” it’s “change makes me uncomfortable.”
I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subsection of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.
Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There’s room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it’s shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.
Firefox’s incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it’s not “this is demonstrably worse,” it’s “change makes me uncomfortable.”
On mobile the changes are more obnoxious. Tabs now take up a lot of screen real estate, despite chromium being an example of being functional and efficient at that for years.
Also, changing the look just to change the look is dumb. UI/UX changes should have a benefit to them. And what people frustratingly seem unable to understand is that newer doesn’t always mean better.
will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
I wonder if it’s possible to build seperate UI that sits on top of the underlying backend and can be switched easily. So that ppl from PS can start quick.
Like with Linux distros and which DE you run?
I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It’s another trope you see often with UI changes – “just let me switch it back.”
The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one – that workload has doubled.
As it happens, though, with your specific example, there’s someone actively maintaining a GIMP
forkmod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they’re still a minor version and a year behind.The whole conversation reminds me of this XKCD
Some people get used to how their daily tools work and look, so when the UI suddenly changes, our efficiency and comfort decreases until we tweak it to our liking and/or get used to it. The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
I didn’t see the point of the Firefox redesign either, and had to spend some time in userchrome.css to make it not actively repulsive :/ A few weeks later now I reached the state of “eh ok”, but I still don’t think it’s an improvement.
If you just want the pre-Nova UI it’s probably easier to about:config > browser.nova.enabled = false
The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
maybe every few years you get a new car? it does all the same things, maybe even better things with new bells and whistles, but fuck all y’all who decided to get rid of my buttons [oldmanyellsatclouds.jif]
there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
okay but some of google’s icon changes have been really bad
You get the same with Apple fans when Apple introduces something new. They all get really angry about it.
For decades, the only thing they needed was clean, easy Action and Macro support.
Most photographers use half a dozen pretty simple actions that they are absolutely incapable of recreating in gimp. Most photogs are technically competant in very VERY narrow fields. Most of them use paint away the ______ which just masks, sets up a specific color channel and lets you math the removal of that color with brushes.
Now, you need to add in context-aware fill, outpainting and sky replacement.
It’s not that.
Photographers went from Photoshop to lightroom quite quickly.
And other proprietary tools as well.
On the open source front many graphics people went to Inkscape instead of gimp.
Gimp methodology and UX is not landing with the majority of people and it’s not offering them enough workflow improvements to justify the learning curve.
Yes, nothing says
Hell hath no fury
Like
I don’t know, I just cannot get used to it and I don’t like the shortcut keys.
Yeah its called hyperbole, you should try it sometime.
Seriously though, as someone who’s main creative outlet is game dev (among other forms of programming), if I can learn a new engine, including new languages and core concepts required to work with the new tools, they can learn to locate some icons and context menus that moved.
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
Like Jesus, what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
Man oh man, let me tell you: some people just never upgrade
You’re just dismissing the claims that the UI is bad and bolstering your ability to adapt. Why can’t everyone be just like you? That’s not how the world works.
what do said people do when their OS upgrades versions?
If your question were real, you’d probably know that everyone complains about UI changes with updates. Usually it’s a temporary annoyance forgotten a week later. Other times, such as windows 11, they switch OSes. People with UI preferences aren’t broken and they don’t owe you anything. Stubbornly rejecting feedback might get you upvotes itt, but it won’t get you very far elsewhere.
I know everyone complains about UI. I’m telling y’all to get the fuck over it.
My point isn’t you have to adapt to technology as well as someone who lives and breathes it, my point is in comparison, moving around some icons and context menus isn’t that fucking big a change. Especially considering its said people who are making the tools for you.
Its a small fucking ask. Hell, If massive tech companies hadn’t spent the last 15 years weaponizing the lie that computers = convinience, mixed with the computer-illiteracy of the average smart phone user, to normalize corporate malware, it probably wouldn’t be so bad.
Before that, it was mostly just the older people and less saavy users who complained UI changes, and in those days GIMPs featureset was still a joke compared to PS.
In your mind, this doesn’t strengthen the case that you’re dismissive? UI design is literally supposed to conform to the user and here you are ridiculing that extremely basic design idea and telling people intuition isn’t a thing, be a fucking robot because it’s not hard.
If you were correct I could reverse your mouse on both axes and you would just adapt. (You obviously fucking wouldn’t and neither would 99.99999% of humans)
If the issue was about basic intuition and not changing a preference which exists because that’s just how Adobe did it, you’d have a point.
These are preferences that exist because people learned a single, arbitrary way of doing things invented by Adobe, and can’t be fucked to re-find the same icon.
A cursor following mouse movements makes intuitive sense, even to people who’ve never touched a fucking computer before. Not a professional piece of software that takes training to properly use, and years of experience to master.
Your mouse-axis example is a false equivalence and you know it.
I would say that you know your “facts” are wrong, but that would imply you’ve ever taken feedback from another human, which you’ve shown here, is far off the table.
Yep. I hate Adobe, but Photoshop and Lightroom really are excellent products.
I love FOSS suites. I generally use Inkscape over Illustrator when I can, even though I have a full Creative Cloud license. I use QGIS frequently over ArcGIS even though I have ESRI. I use stone tablets and my own blood over Word because fuck Word.
But GIMP just doesn’t do it.
gimp fucking sucks though.
Totally agree with you. I struggle to use it because it doesn’t function the way I expect it to when I am trying to edit something. Still have it installed anyways because it has decent gif support.
It does and I’m dying on this hill with you.
Good riddance to you both.
I don’t think it sucks, but people thinking it’s painful to use ought to be taken as legitimate feedback instead of blind hate. It’s a weird UI. I want to like it but I can barely use it even when I force myself to.
It really does suck, it is one of the worst tools ever made. I have the resume to back this up, I worked in digital media for over 30 years, and was a professional developer for 20. Gimp is an appalling piece of shit, it is a joke. No professional artist who has access to proper tools would ever choose to use it. These are the facts. Gimp is “better than nothing” but just barely.
I myself started my career as a web designer. I’m well versed in Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, and premiere. Part of what makes those tools good is their fairly consistent UI choices and easy to remember shortcut keys, many of which feel intuitive and based on something.
Gimp definitely lacks some features, but I’d be happy to use it if it had a UI that didn’t break my brain. I do not think you’re being super fair about your assessment. Every time I’ve needed it for anything, assuming I had the time and patience, I’ve been able to do what I needed to in terms of editing with layers, applying effects, etc. But it was always fairly uncomfortable. So yeah I don’t think it’s an objective fact that no one would ever use it because it’s the worst software ever.
GIMP SUCKS
screaming something stupid isn’t clever
GIMP can’t draw circles. Bye.
skill issue. it can draw circles just fine, you just refuse to learn anything different.
Show us please. In other software it can be done in 1 click or 2.
To draw a circle in GIMP, select the Ellipse Select Tool (E), hold Shift to lock a 1:1 aspect ratio, drag out your shape
Totally impossible, you are right!
That’s a selection, not drawing yet; not to speak of editing the shape afterwards. Anyway, pardon on my part, I actually meant to say circular stroke, like this:
In Pixelitor, Photocraft, Photocraft’s miniPaint web tool, the screenshot tools Spectacle and Flameshot this is all trivial to do, why not in GIMP?
Funny thing is, I think that’s how you do it in Photoshop as well. The shift/control/alt to lock aspect ratio, origin, etc. is pretty common. MS Paint had it. lmao
