I love GIMP and no amount of tedious naysaying will ever change my mind
I did a few tutorials years ago. I realized that the way it did things was different from Photoshop and, in some ways, better. I could appreciate some of the design choices.
The problem is that most people learn PS first and then don’t learn Gimp at all, and then when they find out Gimp doesn’t work like Photoshop, they decide that it sucks.
I’ve been using it for decades.
If they’d make the macroing system idiot proof, maybe talk to some portrait photographers about how they use Photoshop and help them achieve their workflows, they could seriously shut down some Adobe.
Same! It’s great! And weird. But mostly great!
I keep discovering new capabilities
Yo same!
I used to work in schools IT and I managed to get a lot of FOSS tools into regular use amongst both staff and students; Audacity, Libre Office, Firefox, even Debian in a few IT labs… but the one that never stuck was GIMP because no teacher is going to tell their class they’ll be using GIMP today.
I know this is a tired point and will probably never be fixed, but that name causes more problems than anything else.
I only learned about this “negative connotation” from people yelling about how GIMP name is bad.
I work in municipal government, and I just renamed the shortcuts on my work computer to avoid having to explain it to another mayor or councilmember. I think they’re adding Photoshop to the bufget anyway next year. GIMP is good for free, but I have to admit Photoshop really is the king of photo editors.
I do really like Inkscape though.
The FOSS software I find to be the most impressive, however, is QGIS. I have ArcGIS and QGIS both installed on my machine and use them both heavily. For data processing, I usually go with QGIS, but then I make most of my deliverables in ArcGIS because it has a way better layout editor and lots of other software and angencies require me to use ESRI REST services.
But I can go with the cheapest ESRI licenses because I don’t have to pay an extra 4 grand a year for the “Erase” tool when I can punch a hole in a shapefile in QGIS for free. And I openly said as much in my last meeting with ESRI when they were trying to get me to upgrade.
This is always interesting to hear because as someone who went school in a non English speaking country, GIMP was obviously never an issue. In most of the world the name isn’t an issue.
I only learned about that alternative meaning years later.
But for millions of people it is… the fact that it isn’t for some cultures does not negate the influence for those where it is. Companies like Apple will skip numbers and names if it’s a problem in one place (like say China) because they realize more adoption is useful. Old Gimp heads though just whine about America or some shit and wonder why nobody fucking uses it after 30 years.
Everything about this project is always saying they’re looking for input and design ideas but their old-ass users shoot down every person that has anything to say, many of whom have ideas from working as actual professionals for those same thirty years.
Well shit, I never cared about the name but this convinced me because adoption and teaching about FOSS matters more.
monkey paw curls, we keep it gimp but pronounce it gimp
gimp
G I M P
G(ee) I (A)M P(ee)
…
How dare you make me sound that out in my head.
proffessors could say “we’ll be using Gnu Image processing” or “Gnu Imp” if they wanted to get lame about it. The real big knoggin move is to just call it GIMP and silently dare your students to act like children
Tell me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers without telling me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers.
Kids would eat you alive.
Could you eli5 why gimp doesn’t work as a name, i genuenly don’t know…
It’s a derogatory term as well as a BDSM term.
Is it derogatory?
Definitely thought it was a humiliation thing
Some consider it an ableist term
Ahhh ok noted
Genuine question, how did you know BDSM but not gimp?
One can know about a general topic and not know the details of the topic.
We should rename it the Gnu Image Leveraging Framework.
Yep, always felt the same way. Can’t be seriously suggested in a professional environment simply because of its name. Whole project been shooting itself in the foot with a machine gun since day 1.
There’s a meme floating about somewhere that goes:
Windows Tool: Producix Pro for Business 2024
MacOS Tool: Sweesh
Linux Tool: klitoris
and this kinda feels like that.
What puritanism does to a mf
I tried Debian for two hours and said fuck this and I went straight back to Ubuntu. I might try it again when I know more about it. For now I’m still very much a noob. Debian’s still Ubuntu’s boring cousin to me and I’m working on making it the fun one I want to invite over.
I’ve recently tried using GIMP again and, as a past detractor, I’ve gotta say it’s improved significantly.
Honestly so much better when they moved away from the “everything is a floating window” interface. I can find stuff now.
I really liked the floating window approach. I don’t mind the new way, but I enjoyed the floaties when they were the default.
There’s a toggle to go back
Funnily enough, back when it was floating by default, I always looked for the toggle to make it one window. But when they made it a single window by default, I found myself toggling it back to floating.
I kinda like having both options. Floating could still make some sense, and it can do cool things that a single window can’t.
exactly. i’ve used photoshop professionally and tried gimp then.
gimp is not quite there yet, but the potential can now be seen.
To be fair, Photoshop peaked about 10 years ago and has been steadily getting worse. It’s only a matter of time before they’re neck and neck.
i pin it around the time they turned it into a subscription with CC. is that 10 years ago already?
It was in the ballpark of 2014-15ish IIRC, so a little over ten years
Not to down on them too much but this comment is kind of funny in the context of a 30 year old program.
if you think about it, phones are where the “new” programs actually are.
The UI needs a global overhaul since the day one and still nobody talks about it
@BlackLaZoR @Vosh I think lots of people talk about it. :)
We have a dedicated UX site for people share to feedback on that very topic, which we try to implement as we can: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work/_items
The hope is that over time, designers will get more comfortable and work on larger design challenges (like how new code contributors start small and hopefully grow to develop more complex features)
I love GIMP, regardless of UI.
I can do loads of stuff despite GIMP’s efforts to stop me.
I’ve been using Photo Gimp plugin with it for years. Otherwise the interface would be an absolute mess.
I’ve never understood the purpose of PhotoGimp. I get why it exists. But it doesn’t do anything magical that GIMP isn’t already designed to let you do in the first place…which is move around, open, close and organize any window or dock into any place you want.
Anyone who has used GIMP for more than a few days has long since organized it to their own personal workflow; even some that look like photoshop.
The same goes for keyboard shortcuts. You can change literally everything about how GIMP looks anytime you want. So why lock yourself into some script that makes it look like a clone of some corporate crap, and worse…donate to the guy who designed said script as though he made something significant that no one else could achieve.
It’s very existence is a lie. Users aren’t locked into anything and he didn’t do some magic to change that. It’s literally how GIMP is designed to be customized.
Play with it. Have fun with it. That’s the entire point.
It’s basically just a drop in configuration to make it look and feel more like the Photoshop interface. Can you accomplish the same with tinkering? Sure. Do I want the spend all day trying to make it look pretty when I need to actually be working in the software? Hell no. Just drop in the plugin and get to work. It has it’s place. It would be less necessary if GIMP default layout didn’t suck right out of the box.
Can you turn it on and off easily? I know my way around photoshop but still want to learn vanilla gimp.
No it’s not just an on/off toggle. You’d have to uninstall the plugin. Install/Uninstall instructions are on the repo page. https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
I’ve been using GIMP for over a decade. It’s slowly starting to become one of the leading sources of frustration in my computing life. The more I learn about it the less it makes any sense.
Not trying to be negative here. Just saying that a modernization is much needed and I’m really excited for this.
Try FreeCAD if you really want to suffer.
FreeCAD had improved massively since the recent 1.0 release, unlike GIMP…
Honestly I switched to Inkscape more and more. Especially for logos.
ironically i find inkscape vastly more intimidating than gimp, inkscape’s interface is barely comprehensible at all whereas gimp is just slightly clunky.
It took me only 20 years to convince myself to Inkscape more. But it’s worth it. 😅
For occasional paths, I agree with you, but when you really start needing deeper vector work, you either get pushed into inkscale or you end up brute forcing it.
Use Krita instead. It has a big tiddy anime waifu right on the splash screen.
Different project scope tho.
Krita does not support random niche format like GIMP.
Yes but the UI is 💯 easier to use.
The number 1 problem with GIMP is poor UI in my experience.
Easier interface AND anime aesthetics? Sign me up.
If they add the feature to set white point in the level tool I’m there. Last I checked they had some bullshit brush-off about how it wasn’t relevant because it’s designed for drawing or some bollocks.
Sorry that my sketches were on paper that wasn’t pure white, I guess?
Now you got me.
no it isnt. we keep hearing this and no, they never have a massive upgrade. that project doesnt do massive. that’s not how it’s ever be run. its stable, predictable, sane, but ugly things we have all hated forever will never be massively revamped in a single update.
ugly things will never be massively revamped teamspeak
Leaving this here for Photoshop converts
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
I use Affinity full time at the moment, but if they ever go paid, I’m running straight to GIMP.
i completely switched to Affinity suit some 3 years ago at work. I was so excited when the affinity4linux install script dropped. but performance makes it near useless. slow and stuttering.
here is for hoping gimp and inkscape can one day match.
My thing is that I use the iPad app with the pencil. The last time I tried GIMP it was great.
It is shocking how well-designed the Affinity apps feel on the iPad. I’m not entirely fond of everything being stuffed away in menus, but I see why they did it, and overall I’ve rarely felt so positively surprised about pleasant UX.
Now if only they hadn’t been bought by Canva… well, at least I still have my old Affinity 2 Suite.
shoutout to diolinux. he does youtube too and is a great advocate for linux and foss.
I’ve always wanted to see gimp on the same level of blender.
Blender is astounding at how much it can do, but boy does it feel like a project that suffered major scope creep. There seems to be years worth of “but what if it could also do this?” attached to it. As a novice Blender user I still find the UI incredibly difficult to work with.
I’m hundreds of hours in and I still sometimes accidentally hit the wrong hotkey and spend 39 minutes figuring out why edit mode doesn’t edit anymore, or why I can’t weight paint in weight mode.
Feature discovery has become more organic and less “unfuck blender” though, so that’s nice.
The grass is uh, slightly less brown on the other side I guess?
Phenomenal program though.
Krita for the win if you just need the drawing part. Left Gimp long time ago for Krita and never looked back.
i’ve used GIMP since 2017 bc photoshop was ridiculisly expensive and GIMP is free. i still use it. yes its ugly, but it works :3
they better add a fucking draw circle tool istg
@janus2 @Vosh You’ll be happy to know it’s in the cards. Proof of Concept now that we have vector layers: https://fosstodon.org/@CmykStudent/116455148076446506
I haven’t touched it lately since a new contributor was interested in implementing it, but one way or the other I hope to get it into 3.4.
it exists lol, just make a circle selection and then “stroke selection”
Or, hear me out, a tool that draws a circle.
It is okay to say that GIMP can technically do this, and also that it needs a straight up circle tool. Not having a live preview of what you are doing is not good UX in this situation.
“GIMP can technically do this” should be its tagline.
That’s how I felt when I discovered non-destructive layer transformations are (technically) possible
Still bothered it doesn’t have a preview tho
I haven’t trusted gimp since the first time I watched Pulp Fiction
We <3 GIMP
The page 404s
What is the upgrade?
I think that’s the new page : https://testing.gimp.org/news/2026/08/16/dev-update-august-2026/
@Hadriscus @phoenixz Just FYI, that’s from our testing page (note the subdomain), so it’ll give you a 404 again once we push it from drafts to the live site.
ah, the whole thing’s a draft. I understand now
Logo change!
