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jes5199
megameter
The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow.
There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten.
Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not one conducive to pleasurable use or professional scenarios where you need to have it pass through multiple hands.
ehsankia
Actually, the way I would put it is that GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers. GIMP is textbook example of how software can technically have all the same features, but be insanely hard to use and utterly confusing to anyone without a guide. Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.
pja
Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use.
Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?
What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.
ngold
Been using gimp for 20 years, every couple years I try and fail to do even the most basic stuff in photoshop. Then I give up and go back to gimp.
ghaff
Honestly, I wouldn't pick Photoshop as a particularly shining example of UX. It's probably better than GIMP. But it's also a product that has accreeted features and ways of doing things over the years and is pretty squarely targeted at people who use it all the time professionally. There are lots of different ways of doing the same or similar things.
tambourine_man
>technically have all the same features
>does more or less the same things
Photoshop has way more features than GIMP. GIMP has some severe basic wholes like lacking CMYK support after 25 years. I think they rather wait for printers to be obsolete than actually spend time implementing the color mode.
dalbasal
>> GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers.
Whole I agree that this is UX design, but I suspect that UX can be (and often is) a product of the type of organisation producing it moreso than the "UX designer hired to do UX." UX for something like Gimp is very hard. The metaphors have to encompass a ton of stuff and the UX needs
A web app created by a bank, electric company or somesuch will tend to be different from an app created by an SV-ish company in a pretty predictable way. Similarly, Gimp seems like a relative of other GNU/OSS software... Calibre comes to mind.
Different types of organisations or ways of doing things have different strengths and weaknesses. Th
kazinator
> Compare it to Photoshop which does more or less the same things but anyone can naturally pick up and use.
Trolling is not appropriate in HN.
tsjq
>The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow.
very well said. totally agree with this
rozab
I really, really wish there was a paint.net clone for Linux. Paint.net is windows freeware, closed source since an early release, which is both feature rich and a pleasure to use. It covers 99% of use cases ordinary people have.
I believe the author closed the source after some other projects tried to use it commercially. It still gets regular updates.
There's an attempt at a clone, Pinta, which was based off the early open source version but it didn't get much further than mspaint functionality.
dreen
Yeah, I switched from GIMP to PaintNET and loved it for my simple needs, but because Pinta wasnt what I hoped it would be nowdays I just use http://www.photopea.com on any system, its basically PaintNET in the browser.
executesorder66
You can also try this: https://github.com/maoschanz/drawing
agumonkey
It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp.
[0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever
BuildTheRobots
> It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most.
You've obviously not tried to replace Adobe Illustrator with Inkscape ;)
(edit: a flippant comment backed by much frustration. If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.)
mkl
I use purely mm for most Inkscape projects (not for laser cutting, but some are for my plotter). Set the units in Document Properties and it just works, IME.
tripzilch
> If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.
I do this all the time (for my mechanical plotter).
InkScape is an incredibly useful tool that can do some things that Illustrator chokes on (doesn't always load standards compliant SVG correctly and/or does weird proprietary shit) -- and vice versa, but I think there could actually be reason to install and use both.
nnq
The same here :) I love to work with other software considered user hostile by others, but Gimp... WTF. It's like they took the most horrible stuff from Photohop s horrible UI and mixed it with more horrible ideas... But PS manages to be horrible and still productively usable and had all the required features, like non destructive editing smart objects etc.
Something like Affinity Photo is the other end of the spectrum, with nice and intuitive UI for almost everything... Though it stills falls short of old Corel Photopaint's nice and intuitive UIs
agumonkey
I think GIMP kinda suffers the same fate as intel. I remember a lot of efforts went into creating the underlying core for image processing (GEGL ?) but then nothing happened. It's stuck at the blender 2.7 way of life.
They may try to revamp ergonomics and performance. But that's their choice.
tartoran
Gimp has script fu / python / scheme. It is quite capable of automating and generating images. Gimp is the kind of software you may hate at first but then start to love it for how extensible friendly it is.
ThePadawan
I tried to automate a simple workflow (resize, reduce color to grayscale) using GIMP just last week. I would want to run this on ~100 files in a folder.
This takes a few lines of calls to imagemagick/gm or ~10 lines of python + Pillow.
Do you have any resources how to do this in GIMP?
After googling for a good while, I could not for the life of me figure out how to even get started with this.
I don't want to write an extension for GIMP - I want to use GIMP like I would an image manipulation library.
agumonkey
Sure, it's extensible but I was speaking on all the other fronts.
shawnz
As a counterpoint I often hear people make this argument but I've never found that to be the case. I find Gimp to have a simple interface in which it's easy to find all the features.
However I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I have found that people who cut their teeth on Photoshop seem to consistently find the Gimp UI confusing.
herbst
I too used and liked Gimp ever since. I was forced to use the adobe stack for a while and never managed liking it, it still feels like a huge blackbox to me.
IMO not everyone is made for (or rather trained to) understand and use overly complex uis.
paulryanrogers
Cut my teeth on PSP then Photoshop in college. Soon thereafter started with GIMP and indeed the different naming and menu organization was a hurdle. Though it wasn't too bad. Still Photoshop was always ahead in features and most things were more logical.
TylerE
Gimp, today, feels like a bad knockoff of what Photoshop was in about 2002.
And Photoshop has gotten a _lot_ more powerful and useable since then.
gorgoiler
Adding a second UI to the codebase (with a friendlier, less conflict inducing name) would be a fantastic addition to the project.
Something along the lines of a cooperative fork, I suppose, focused on exposing a minimal set of features but keeping the underlying image processing models.
Fewer buttons. Distilled UI. Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG.
[...and this is almost exactly what Glimpse is, thank you other commenters!: https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ ]
prokoudine
Glimpse is GIMP minus one brush, one menu item, and GIMP branding, plus Photoshop shortcuts, plus a few popular plugins. That is all it is at the moment.
kazinator
> Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG.
You mean instead of two rapid workflows?
1. File -> Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png.
First time it is used, there is prompting. After that, no prompting. Has no hotkey.
2. Or use Export As, which has a Shift-Ctrl-E hotkey.
The first time you use Export As, there is prompting. But after the first use, the "Overwrite Existing <whatever>.png" menu item (for workflow 1) disappears from the File menu and is replaced by "Export To <whatever>.png". This action has no prompting at all, and has Ctrl-E as the hot key.
Workflow 1 has less initial prompting than 2; it goes straight to the Export dialog (for setting parameters) without prompting for a filename or overwrite confirmation; it's good if you're editing many images and saving just once.
gorgoiler
Thanks. I feel stupid now.
I guess I would have expected this to be called “save”?
starky
I learned on software like PaintShop Pro and Photoshop, so I find GIMP to be incredibly frustrating software. I use it at work for editing and cropping photos since I don't have access to Adobe's suite and I'm fairly quick at those few tasks. But I just can't be bothered to learn anything more than that when I find it so frustrating and inefficient to use.
jansan
I am actually using PaintShop Pro 7.04 until today. It is good enough for 95% of my bitmap graphics work and it just feels so easy to use.
throwawaylolx
I only ever use GIMP out of necessity and when I do I can't wait to stop using it. I never had a pleasant experience using GIMP and it almost never failed to frustrate me. Just yesterday I had to use it, and this is what my search history looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ZP3U17i.png . I'm pretty fluent in Photoshop and I've also begrudgingly used GIMP for many years. It's a very bizarre tool.
sildur
Both, Photoshop and GIMP are really complex programs with steep learning curves. I tried to do some editing in Photoshop, since I now have a license, and I was totally lost. I tried to add some guides so I could draw a rectangle to cut a image. I tried dragging from the border of the image, as I do with GIMP, and no way. So I resorted back to GIMP, not wanting to spend half an hour trying to learn how to select and cut an image in Photoshop when I already know how to do it in GIMP.
thraway123412
This looks like another instance of "I don't know how to use gimp, but I know how to use photoshop, therefore gimp is a very bizarre tool."
I'm pretty fluent in Gimp, and I only ever use Photoshop out of necessity, and I'm always totally lost when I need to do that.
kazinator
> this is what my search history looked like
> gimp resize image
Image -> Scale Image
Very bizarre, indeed! Scaling the image is a "Scale Image" command in an "Image" menu.
> gimp rotate layer
Layer -> Transform -> Rotate { 90° Clockwise, 90° Counter-Clockwise, Arbitrary Rotation ...}
Totally undiscoverable. Rotating a layer is buried in the completely unrelated Layer menu and obfuscated by terminology. The user has to be a propeller-head who knows bizarre jargon, such as that a rotation is a kind of "transform" and might be hiding under a menu item labeled that way.
To add insult to injury, this menu item has not moved in at least 15 years to a more obvious place. Gimp clearly likes existing users better than new ones.
> gimp rescale interactive
In the latest stable Gimp (2.10.22) which I just installed last night, there is a surprise: I can't find the Rotate tool button. Aha, there is an "all in one" transformation tool. The Gimp version I previously used still had separate toolbar buttons for different transforms.
I see that we can right click on the all-in-one transformation button, and then pick a specific kind of transform. We want Scale, which is also available as the familiar Shift-S hotkey.
The Tool Options dialog comes up for the tool. I see that the very first item is a bunch of icon-labeled buttons next to a Transform: label. They all have tooltips: "layer", "selection", "path" and "image". Aha: Transform -> "image" must be what we want. We click on that.
Now we proceed to interactively rotate the image, and apply that change using the Scale button on the rotate dialog.
In summary: Shift-S to scale, pick "image", do the interactive scale, and click "Scale" to make it stick.
For your other queries, you just have to know how to work with transparent layers in Gimp. Gimp is not a carbon copy of Photoshop.
You were not born knowing how to erase pixels transparently in Photoshop.
zokula
> I never had a pleasant experience using GIMP and it almost never failed to frustrate me.
Funny! I hear the same complaints about Photoshop only the amount of complaints are 10 times as much.
app4soft
> GIMP is such a strange tool.
GIMP is less strange than AzPainter[0], even less strange than GrafX2[1].
FTR, Grafx2 (GrafX 2.0 and beyond) would celebrate its own 25th Anniversary next year.[2]
But really, development of the first version of GrafX2 (GrafX 1.0) started in 1995.[3]
> GRAFX 2.00 Beta 90% (11/01/1996) - Wired'96 release
> This version was 1st shown at the Wired'96 demo party in Belgium. We gave it to many people there, so let's start history from here. Note that there were a few different "90%" versions because we didn't want to change the number just for tiny bug-fixes.
> GRAFX 1.0? -> 1.02 (09/??/1995 -> 07/??/1996)
> Forget it!
So, Grafx2 & GIMP are age-mates, but GrafX2 maybe is 'older brother'.
[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter
[2] http://grafx2.chez.com/index.php?article4/version-history
usrusr
Quite similar situation here: it's the tool that I know but that I will never master. I'm not bothered much by the UI though, it gets the job done well enough for the occasional pixel task. What I mind much more is the atrocious startup time (might be a peculiarity of wingimp)
kazinator
It's starting in about 3 seconds for me, on a laggardly 2013-vintage Core i5 CPU, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10.
I know what you're talking about; historically there used to be a long pause in the startup progress bar of the Windows verison, stuck on scanning system fonts or something. But I don't see that in the current version (2.10.22).
riidom
Check your version and likely you should update (if you don't rely on plugins that aren't ported yet). Startup time was increased by a huge amount some time ago (can't remember when exactly).
prokoudine
Summer 2018 when async fonts loading was introduced.
kody
The first time I downloaded the GIMP was when I realized that MS Paint wouldn’t cut it for making convincing Runescape “fakes”. I was too chicken to pirate Photoshop but knew that I needed better tools to do what I needed. I went on to use the GIMP to make Runescape forum signatures (proud member of $clan, $skill in woodcutting, etc). That was the first time I had people PMing me, asking me to make something for them. The first time I “sold” anything. A thrill I don’t experience anymore.
I went on to use the GIMP to make textures for Morrowind mods, diagrams and design mockups in college, and my wedding invitations.
Today I use the GIMP to design software architecture diagrams, mockups, and my D&D battlemaps.
I don’t mean to beat the dead Free Software horse, but this tool was indispensable for my creative young self. I’m gonna go give them some money now for the first time in 15 years of using the software. Thanks for sharing this.
HeadsUpHigh
I miss those forum banners a lot. One of those things that you could really make your profile yours.
neolog
GIMP's name comes from Pulp Fiction.
> It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
bahmboo
My twitter account was suspended until I removed a post with the word gimp in it. It was not an abusive post.
phkahler
That sounds like a problem with twitter.
michaelmrose
The only problem with IMP would be the theoretical problem of the icon might look too much like Freebsd. Sounds like a missed opportunity.
babuskov
It could have been GINP, as in GINP Is Not Photoshop.
Close, but no cigar ;)
gilrain
In retrospect it was probably a mistake to choose a name which is either a niche aspect of the BDSM lifestyle or an ableist pejorative. That it was deliberate is even more baffling.
h2odragon
It's perfect. It's a funky little tool you only take out of the box when you need it for a specific purpose. You use it (with vigor and some cussing because it fights back); get your job done, and shove it back into the box of shame, until the next time you need it. You might love what it does for you but you rarely celebrate the tool itself, preferring instead to delight in the faint tinge of shame.
"GIMP" is the perfect name for this software.
user-the-name
It is also something you call disabled people when you want to be really insulting. It doesn't matter one bit that you didn't mean it to mean that, that meaning still exists, and it's still what people see when they see the name.
It is an absolutely awful name.
jansan
Did you know that the term for a female Gimp is "Glimpse"? :)
manaskarekar
GIMP has been one of my constantly used software for over 20 years. I recall messing with text effects and some Python-fu. Still use it to this day for all kinds of editing.
And it gave us GTK!
Congrats.
mongol
This deserves to be higher. It spawned GTK, which spawned Gnome and so on. In this way, it is one of the most influential open source software programs around. I recall also that in it's youth, it showed what is possible, it staked out a future. There were not many as advanced GUI programs around like it then, but xv was of course the go-to program in the graphics category.
throwawaygimp
Very long time Gimp user, also photoshop user here.
Full credit to all the hard working developers on it over the years. You should be proud of what you created.
However.
Gimp was always just slightly too good, mature, stable and complete, to justify alternative projects.
Gimp IMHO is the reason we don't have a layered raster (& vector) editor in 2020 which can hold a candle to Photoshop.
There have been attempts, but Gimp really sucked the wind out of the motivation to do competing OSS projects - for all really good reasons mentioned above.
So no criticism of the software it's self here... just sometimes something succesful can stifle competition.
I'd love to see more clean sheet 'Photoshop alternatives'.
prokoudine
The real reason is that making complicated software is hard, and few people have enough motivation to do that. Blaming lack of persistence on other software is a very strange take on dealing with this.
gpvos
We have Krita now. I don't know much about it, but it seems to be able to do many of the same things.
BeetleB
Krita can do quite a few basic things, and a few advanced things that Gimp can't, but they're really not in the same league. If you're a serious photo editor, Krita is quite lacking, and will always be - they do not intend to be a photo editor.
archerx
I rather edit my photos in Krita than suffer through gimp any day.
mackrevinack
only thing I don't understand in krita is the stamp/clone tool so I open glimpse (gimp) if I need to do anything that involves that. otherwise I do everything in krita these days. the interface is nicer, the hotkeys make more sense and I find it easier to work with layers
arendtio
I like GIMP.
Yes, the user interface has changed a lot over the years, but the underlying principles of how to compose images are still the same. I am no artist, so my requirements might be quite a bit lower than those of the typical Photoshop user, but GIMP is still my tool of choice if it comes to manipulating individual image files. For Vector Graphics I prefer Inkscape and for photos Darktable, but those are just more specialized use cases. Without Gimp my computer would be missing a crucial tool to edit images.
Thank you GIMP contributors and congratulations to your 25th anniversary.
cs02rm0
For me it's a case of being the worst open source image editor, except for all the others.
The scripts always seem broken, the UI was a mess for a while on a Mac. The multi windowed system was great if the windowing manager expected that sort of thing and terrible otherwise.
Ufraw integration seems an awful way of getting to edit raw files and I go years at a time without being able to get it working on a Mac.
But it's still my first choice.
IshKebab
It's definitely worse than Krita.
prokoudine
Your experience from 10-15 years ago is kinda irrelevant today :)
No multiple windows, darktable or RawTherapee rather than UFRaw etc.
wongarsu
Single-Window Mode only became default in 2018 with Gimp 2.10. There are plenty of people around who haven't updated Gimp in that time and have yet to find out about this wonderful feature.
prokoudine
It always puts a smile on my face when people see a feature released in 2012 (as an option) and go, like, "wow, you finally did it!" :)
dvirsky
Creating an open source desktop app tends to require a different set of skills than what most open source developers have, and getting top notch UX designers and product managers to work on an open source project. When open source developers work on servers, networking, frameworks, etc - they can do top notch work and be their own PMs, it's much much harder for desktop software.
anewguy9000
have you tried krita? imo its worlds ahead
keyle
I just gave it another whirl, maybe first time in 10 years. It's still as shocking, UX wise.
I hate Photoshop, I use it very often. It's bloated since before CS1, it's annoying to use, it's DRM rooted with a service running 24/7 on my machine, and it's also very costly.
Sadly, there is literally no option nearly as good. Adobe got me by the balls.
egonschiele
If you're willing to pay for it, the Affinity line and Procreate are both strong contenders. I don't use Photoshop anymore, those tools have replaced it.
scarfacedeb
I concur, Affinity Photo is an excellent tool. I forgot about Photoshop a long time ago.
I'm still waiting for their Lightroom replacement though. For some reason I just couldn't adapt to Darkroom.
tannhaeuser
Slightly O/T but have F/OSS graphic apps gotten worse over time? Sitting in front of Inkscape on Ubuntu 20.04 and the thing crashes, wouldn't display guides, wouldn't snap, is overloaded with controls to leave a poststamp-sized canvas for your actual work on a notebook, has miniscule icons not really helpful for revealing functionality, and even lacks icons for basic actions so you're basically clicking on black borders to hope to get some actions back. Guess I have to manually calculate and edit SVGs when I just wanted to construct really simple tangents and typographic Bezier curves. Or is it Ubuntu 20.04 and gnome which just suck? It has recently improved a little bit at least, but is bordering on the unusable for me. What is the recommendation for a Linux workstation OS that is at least designed to run the precious few graphic apps we have? I used to run FreeBSD in the 2000s, so that is an option, too, in the hope that FreeBSD will priorize support for running actual X11 apps rather than grand plans for tablet UIs from early 2010s left in a state of neither here nor there.
warent
I used Gimp every so often over the past few years and always loved it... until just about a month ago when I finally tried photoshop for the first time. I really don't like Adobe, but photoshop just blows gimp out of the water. anything you want to do in gimp, you can do in photoshop in a fraction of the time and with higher quality. It makes me feel like I've been unknowingly torturing myself for years
distances
I have had to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. One of the GIMP strengths is that I can just install it and do the small task I need to. No hassle with compatibilities and requesting licenses and whatever. Just get it and go.
I'm a developer and my editing needs are very modest. GIMP just feels like the right tool. I've heard lots of praise for Krita too though, should try that out too.
ogre_codes
Phenomenal.
One of my all time favorite pieces of Open Source Software. I used GIMP for years as my goto photo editor before migrating to the Mac.
Lipsey
You can still run GIMP on Mac. I do and love it.
klodolph
You can, but there are lots of better options available.
Lipsey
Free and Open source? Please which ones do you recommend?
ogre_codes
I know, I don't do as much photo editing anymore and there are some better integrated/ Mac friendlier options that take care of my needs for just a few bucks.
I love FOSS, but I also like creative/ great products by small to mid-size indie developers like Pixelmator. For what I do, it's fantastic, they have a iPad app too which is where I do most of my photo editing.
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ghoomketu
I wish there was an easier Gimp, like Paint shop pro 5 easy, because it may be the most powerful tool for image editing yet I've hard a super hard time creating a simple screenshot with a red arrow. Found some stack overflow tutorials to import some stuff that were broken for which I had to go to internet archive.
Wasted few hoours, still didn't work, so started looking for alternative solutions. Finally found a tool called shuttr which has an in-built image editor which finally does the job that I want including surprisingly most of my other image editing requirements.
I think my fault is when I was using Windows I used Photoshop for everything so I assumed Gimp is the linux version for Photoshop.
ddeck
>I wish there was an easier Gimp, like Paint shop pro 5 easy, because it may be the most powerful tool for image editing yet I've hard a super hard time creating a simple screenshot with a red arrow.
I find Pinta useful for those sorts of tasks. It's open source and supports most platforms.
_Microft
"Pinta is a Gtk# clone of Paint.Net 3.0", [0]
I knew it looked familiar. It's the toolbar icons. Paint.NET is amazing and exactly what I need most of the time. Too bad that they turned away from open source after people/sites started selling own builds [1]. Going after these people legally might have been preferable from our view but I understand that changing the license might have been both cheaper and actually more feasible.
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GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable?
But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. And basically I have never figured out how to do anything else in it. After twenty years. Sometime, more than a decade ago, they made the tool icons both harder to recognize visually more unpredictable in their toolbox layout, and that still slows me down, too.
I just can't think of anything else I've had this kind of relationship with - other tools, I either master, or I move on from. GIMP is an odd one.