While all the comments about GIMP needing a total UX overhaul etc. are likely valid, it's worth noting that there's something like 2 people working on the bulk of GIMP at the moment.
It's not a startup that has just raised a series A and opened a flashy San Francisco office.
All that is to say that I don't think the problem is the GIMP devs not knowing what the problems are and needing them explained over and over again.
The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
I think there is room for both approaches. Like it or not, photoshop/adobe is the defacto standard everything else is measured from. A compatibility layer like Inkscape does for illustrator has for PS-like behavior is welcome to bring “industry” users in the fold.
My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.
As an outsider, trying to make some UI/UX changes in old open source projects is often extremely energy consuming and difficult. You have to convince all the old hands, who feel it's their project (maybe rightfully so) that the changes are good for new users. Old users will mostly fight any change (don't want to relearn). Many discussions end with "maybe let's make this a setting?". This leads to crappy software with bad defaults, way too many options and nobody will ever use the new settings.
Even though I have a background in UX design, I'm not cut out for this kind of open source work. I've tried.
LibreOffice did a great job of transitioning to an alternative UX and went further to implement not just ribbons but different combinations classic menu with ribbons.
That's the answer IMO, yeah now there's two UX to maintain but it's a step forward.
Another outsider, but Krita seem to be doing really well keeping their UX up to date. To the point where I often use it for a lot of stuff meant to be done by GIMP
After the attitude displayed by those developers towards e.g. opening jpegs and saving GIMP format files, I don’t think I’m interested in contributing and have replaced using GIMP with Paint.Net and Corel.
I feel like people working on things for free can be cut a little bit of slack and not always be policed about any random person not linking their 'attitude' for some comment on a PR they made or whatnot.
But I guess it's easier to come up with reasons for not contributing than actually contributing.
> The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
> So if you can, contribute.
Well, that requires knowledge of C. That already excludes
like 98% of the user base or so, or perhaps 90%.
Also, even aside from this, if a majority wants feature
xyz but you don't like that, what can you do? It is a
constant time investment to convince a majority that
what they want may not be great.
You make it sound as if the only bottleneck is lack of
developers. I think there are many more bottlenecks
than merely lack of developers.
Agreed, I think the bottlenecks are often the gate keepers already in the community. In fact one of the other replies to the parent indicates that mentality. Where they are happy that GIMP has remained unchanged and are happy with the UI. This is exactly the kind of sentiment that often makes progress become stagnant. The small vocal community gets used to things like poor UI, and then turns into a NIMBY about any changes that would benefit the masses (but require them learning new things).
Unfortunately I think this is why most of the time you don't see progress in applications like this until there is a fork or a whole new application. Especially with AI based development now, I think the problem is often not the lacking people to make code, but lacking people that allow the code to be contributed in the first place.
I've never understood GIMP's approach to copy paste either. They've made a decision that copy and paste must require as many un-intuitive steps as possible.
Most graphics programs let you select a region, copy it and then move the copy around to where you want it, the end. You can usually paste into new layer if needed.
But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.
This kind of thing just makes me use other software.
I've memorised the keyboard shortcuts that I need in order to do this extremely common thing.
1. Select region with mouse.
2. Ctrl-C: Copy the region.
3. Ctrl-V: Paste (with the selection still active, so that it pastes in the same place).
4. Ctrl-Shift-N: Makes the resulting "temporary layer" into a permanent new layer.
5. Use the new layer.
I wish I could skip step 4. It's usually not necessary, and if I need to place the temporary layer into the same layer that I was already using, I can just merge the two myself.
Of course, sometimes you do need the ability to directly paste into the same thing, such as if you're editing a layer mask rather than the actual layer itself...
Not sure what you’re seeing, but if you choose the move (four arrow button) tool after pasting, it will move the selection. Then you can create a layer or merge down etc if you wish but not required.
Slightly beyond that, pasting creates a temporary new layer you can manipulate like normal layers before anchoring it or converting it to a normal layer. It's visible in the Layers window as a separate layer from the one you were working on.
Copy & Paste default behavior was changed in GIMP 3.0 (I was one of the people who worked on the change). GIMP 2.10 and earlier creating floating selections as described earlier.
I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.
GIMP gets the work done. I've never had an issue I couldn't address with its tools, but it's clear the UI was crafted by coders. I'm glad for this approach.
And I'm glad to see such a simple approach to making it usable. Not a fork creating whole new problems to worry about, just reconfiguring the UI and now Bob's your uncle.
Now if GIMP would just stop rewriting the file on each run, making it difficult to keep in revision control....
i really don't mind the GIMP UI but then again I used it for a very long time, so perhaps that's why (same for PS, I'm a 1.0 user).
On the flip side, I'd love a darktable that is closer the lightroom's UI, for similar reasons. Somehow, i find it more difficult to get the same speed and flow with darktable.
Is it? Why? Looking at the screenshot on this, it just seems like a few items were moved around a bit, presumably because that's where Photoshop has them.
Yeah, I was too, I'll clarify. The photoGIMP UI doesn't seem that meaningfully different than the default UI to me, to where the idea that it is then not "crafted by coders" doesn't seem to make sense to me.
Every few years I give GIMP a shot, and every time I give up because it's completely inscrutable. Adobe is evil, and Pixelmator lacks features, but at least you can figure out how to use them in short order.
Every time I give Photoshop a chance I give completely up, the thing doesn't even start on neither Fedora or Ubuntu and I have no interest in configuring Wine for this. GIMP is the least painful way to get the job done. I have been using it for over 20 years, and it has been a pain-free experience. That GIMP is bad is just as wrong as the people who say Java is bad.
But you know what's even worse, people that use Illustrator to create SVG's for the web. Inkscape creates proper readable SVG's at 5KB, compared to 50MB SVG's I get from Illustrator experts.
Photoshop is widely used for painting/drawing, yes. Hooking up a Wacom or similar tablet is very common.
Granted, a lot of this has moved to iPad + apple pencil since that combo was released, but Photoshop is still heavily used. Of course, you can run Photoshop on iPad, too.
I actually find the opposite. I don't actually think either of us are wrong, it probably comes down to what we got started with. I love that in Gimp layers can have totally different canvas sizes, and I prefer it's foreground select tool.
But most of all, any comparison is going to be silly. Photoshop has lots of amazing features and in sure is better in a technical comparison to Gimp in many ways.
A lot of times the best tool for the job is the one that works great for you.
I think you might be equivocating these on their names, but it's simply not the same. People complain about the name of GIMP because it causes them problems when trying to use it in work and school. But nobody is complaining about GIMPS name, right? It's not even software.
This comment should just be automatically posted in every GIMP thread. Then nobody else needs to post these trite points again and again and again and again.
GIMP and its UI are the only material here, what are you talking about? These are pain points about GIMP that multiple people have brought up every time GIMP has been mentioned online for decades.
I say this as someone who has used GIMP for two decades now. It was the first real image editor I used, so the UI/UX is fine to me, but it's clearly a problem.
GIMP is steadfast about the name, but has been slowly incorporating UI/UX improvements since its existence. (Single window mode, canvas rotation, more consistent UI on Macs with 3.0, high DPI support, etc.) GIMP doesn't have raw support yet, but it does have high bitdepth support (both integer and floating point).
The whole point of GIMPShop and PhotoGIMP are to address these pain points.
Again, it's about 20 years too late, but the rename thing is absolutely correct and I continue to be gobsmacked by the amount of people here who don't get this, especially as I've seen this place slowly move from actually being about "hacking" to being about "tech and business."
While I agree, and I've been hammering this point as a GIMP user for two decades I think the "GIMP is actually a fine name" are increasingly a minority. Its name makes GIMP hostile to user adoption. Anyone who works in a primarily English-spekaing country knows what it's like to try to use GIMP at work, especially in K-12.
It's not like it was an accident, either. GIMP is a backronym because they wanted to name it after the full-body sex slave suit. They shot themselves in the face with that one.
It’s only the British (and influenced by) who have a negative view of the name. The rest of us don’t care, and wish you’d quit bringing it up.
For example there’s a juice company here in the US named ’Suja,’ and it’s obvious they have no Brazilian employees because it means dirty/obscene in Portuguese.
Simple words sometimes mean unfortunate things in other countries. Adults get over them.
This is not true, I am in America and the name has been seriously problematic.
This is not surprising, the developers were English-speaking Americans who chose a name to cause offense on purpose, in reference to the full-body sex slave suit in Pulp Fiction: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
I don't know who you claim to represent with "the rest of us", but I can only speak for the experience in America. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with me, it's a simple fact that the name GIMP has been a barrier to its adoption.
To repeat, it's not a collision, because it was not accidental. Kimball and Mattis named their image editor after the full-body sex-slave suit, on purpose. GIMP is a backronym.
It's also worth emphasizing that "Pulp Fiction" is not an obscure movie, it was actually a very very popular movie from the 1990s and it's still relevant today. It won awards from every organization that gave movies awards. It was recently quoted by the US Secretary of Defense during a prayer, who thought he was quoting the Bible.
While I believe you when you say you're personally not familiar with the usage of the word, it's a word that you can expect most people would recognize.
Do you have any evidence it was done on purpose? The devs have referenced the unfortunate name a few times but I think it is infinitely more likely they chose the name in reference to the poor quality of the software or as a normal acronym
> > Your home page says that you created GIMP to address the lack of free or inexpensive Unix graphics tools. How did you guys actually get together to tackle this? Was it like in Blues Brothers? Were you on a mission from God?
> Spencer was my brother's roommate for four years. (He's been my roommate for the past six months). So I knew who he was when we decided to take the compilers course here together. Big mistake. During one of the impossibly boring assignments we decided we wanted to do something which wouldn't suck. The idea of doing the GIMP actually fell out fairly naturally.
> 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.
I'm gen Z, we know what Pulp Fiction is. Even the gen alphas do. We just had a crossover in Fortnite, and Pulp Fiction is in the Chainsaw Man opening.
I'm anti-Puritan as well, but there are far better hills to die on. In either case, it's moot, since "gimp" is also used as an ableist slur.
I haven't seen Footloose, but we don't need analogies to fictional movie villains. The facts are that they decided to give GIMP a stupid name, and so they missed out on investment and adoption because of that decision. It doesn't matter what you or I think, I'm just describing something that already happened.
> and Pulp Fiction is in the Chainsaw Man opening.
Not looking to assess how well-known Pulp Fiction is in any particular generation, but Chainsaw Man opening seems to have plenty of obscure references that really say more about its authors than they do about its watchers.
Sorry, a focus on thirty year old movies and "ableist slur"s puts you far outside the mainstream. These are simply not concerns of every day people, and doubly so for the half that voted tRump.
No need to apologize, you didn't know. In either case, it doesn't matter whether or not Pulp Fiction is "mainstream".
It does not matter what you think. It does not matter what I think. No amount of condescending comments online can go back and change it, the name "GIMP" has caused problems for people, including me, when trying to use it in professional and K-12 contexts.
The ways I personally learned people took offense at these words were when I was trying to use GIMP in highschool, asking if I could "use the GIMP" for a project. My instructor, a man who was paralyzed from the waist down, understandably thought I was punking him. I wouldn't learn this until later, but the most reasonable interpretation was that I was being a shithead, as many teenagers are.
When I explained "GIMP was like Photoshop but free", while Photoshop was already installed on the computers, you won't be surprised the conversation ended there and Photoshop won out.
It's not just that the name was insulting. In most peoples minds, nothing good is free, and "Free photoshop clone" was right up there with "Here's a prize for the 1,000,000th visitor" or "Download these free mouse cursors".
Thank you for this. I hate doing "offense aside" but.
Offense aside, you can still understand that this is a bad idea without bringing in the spectre of "is it offensive."
Like I'm saying elsewhere, what if it was called "Poop-edit" or similar? People would quite reasonably not believe it to be quality software, even if it was.
And also, no one would USE IT. That's my point. It really is that simple.
I'm not primarily talking about "being offended." Jokes are fine in some contexts.
I'm saying that if you want people to take your software seriously, it needs a serious name. And that the GIMP people very very stupidly missed a huge opportunity by not doing that.
Individual adults absolutely do, but "systems, PR, and institutions" DO NOT, and that is the important lesson that so many people here aggressively dodge.
I personally can download this software and use it on my computer.
Now, can I recommend it to my class? Through zero fault or opinion of my own, it still might be a very bad idea for me professionally.
Maybe I don't like how sensitive people are. TOO BAD, it doesn't matter in this context.
The clowns who refuse to rename GIMP keep missing a huge opportunity.
I’ve had GIMP recommended as a free photo editing tool in many classes. Just saying that’s while you may not feel comfortable with recommending it, many others do.
> Anyone who works in a primarily English-spekaing country knows what it's like to try to use GIMP at work, especially in K-12.
Over the many times this topic was brought up here, plenty of people from English-speaking countries have said that no, they’ve never had a problem with it.
Yes, some people did have a problem with it. It's a valid point to bring up. But that does not mean their experience must have been shared by literally everyone else, or even the majority of people in similar circumstances.
That's fair, it's likely not _everybody_ would have a problem. But _enough_ people would. There are contexts where I've had no problems (e.g. in an office where every cubicle had at least one Linux machine, plenty of people had already heard of GIMP).
I think if GIMP had a different name, it would have had less friction in its adoption (or a higher "R-number"), Adobe would be less extractive (for having viable FOSS to compete with), and GIMP would have had more investment (in terms of money and dev hours). I'm certainly happy GIMP isn't completely abandoned, at the very least.
But what it DOES mean is -- okay, is it really worth it to KEEP it, or might you be able to get adoption, fans, traction, possibly more developers etc. etc. if you were to change it?
What is the strong motivation behind keeping the name and was it valid?
(No. The answer is no, it was not. There's no real good reason to keep it compared to the potential upsides.)
There was a short lived project to fork and rebrand under Glimpse with improved UI, but it's been inactive for years. All the links I find are forks of forks, 404s, and parked domains.
Eh, every term for disabled people becomes a slur. Moron->idiot->retard (the latter being so unacceptable in modern speech it is labelled by the kids as "the hard r"). But you are right, we should simply not use terms for disabled people in software names. I propose "Thirty Years and Still Cannot Draw a Circle" or the hip short name :no-entry-sign: emoji.
Tangent, but it might help you avoid an embarrassing situation later on. If someone says "They called me the hard-R", they're not talking about the R-word.
"R----d" is usually just called "the R word", while "the hard R" refers specifically to the standard version of "the N word". (As opposed to "the soft A", which is sometimes used synonymous with "dude".)
I am glad someone is putting in this effort. Many years ago, there was another project called GIMPshop to make GIMP's interface more accessible to Photoshop users.
GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use.
> GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use
Agreed. I'm already willing to use GIMP in its current state. But though I've used it since I was a child, I have to re-google for things I know it can do.
I had a photo of a barn. I was going to construct it in miniature, so to get scale measurements I wanted an isometric perspective from a photo that had been taken at an angle. I had done this in GIMP before so I was hesitant to start googling for answers but in 25 minutes of playing with it, no combination of inputs would do what I wanted. I had to find some youtube tutorials.
Even simple tasks aren't simple. Annotating a photograph with a couple red arrows is a multi step challenge involving paths, stroking, selections, layers, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting. These UI concepts were impenetrable without tutorials -- I never would have figured this out on my own.
GIMP has helped me but it's never been pleasant to use.
Not if you're a professional in a big boy company, where the MacOS users can literally draw a perfect arrow in 2 seconds on any image, without installing a thing. You're just going to look completely incompetent.
Another lesson GIMP could take from Blender is the importance of a python REPL that updates with the analog commands to the menu items you're clicking. GIMP allows scripting from some kind of lisp, but in many hours of attempt I've never gotten it to do what I know it can do. But I was effective in blender within seconds because it allowed me to directly translate my actions to code.
We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.
Blender also had a comparatively large amount of money backing these changes, if I remember correctly, which I expect GIMP does not. I suppose a lesson in that area would be required first. However, the others like Krita might be better positioned for this.
I tried using gimp on Mac to do some extremely basic stuff. I just wanted multiple layers to make a little mock up at work. Gimp’s mental model is unintuitive to me, I got so frustrated trying get anything done. I gave up and bought acorn for Mac to make my basic little image.
Gimp will never be able to pull a Blender because they are operating on hugely different conditions.
Blender never had to play catch up with a proprietary file format. In Blender's world, fbx and any of the video formats are the way to interop with other studios.
In the Photoshop/Gimp world, the interop format is psd. Under full control of Adobe.
There is also the matter of price. Maya and 3dStudioMax are eye watering expensive, while Photoshop is dirt cheap. As a professional photographer, I can get the 300 GBP it costs me to have Lightroom and Photoshop for one year, in an afternoon.
Just the existence of Gimp seems like so much effort flushed down the toilet because of someone's bad, bad taste and incredibly poor user interface design
Krita is not very good for photo manipulation. Even basic stuff like rectangle select and selection manipulation is painful. But on a project I used Krita, Gimp, and Inkscape all at the same time, and it was fine. Different tools for different purposes. Though with Gimp 3 having better font/text behavior, and overall allowing to build a pipeline of effects instead of immediately applying them (aka non-destructive editing), I could probably drop Inkscape now.
Pretty sure there has been various efforts to do this, but they all eventually stall due to being unable to keep up with the GIMP source. I hope this time they're taking an approach that will allow them to keep up with the maintenance.
I cant stand Gimp UI, so not intuitive. And over 25 years of Photoshop use has me locked into a way that image editing should work. This is fantastic and timely.
I never really had an issue with the program UI, though. Maybe because I also never went through the trouble of pirating/buying Photoshop to get used to it. Their new effects system (where they have to be applied and sit on top of the layer until then) was pretty bugged on release on Windows, though.
I'm sure it's a bit like for people who are used to Blender, whereas others find their interface... unique as well.
Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).
However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.
The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.
We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!
I believe it's a step up from "design by whichever developer implemented a particular feature", which was the norm. :)
More seriously, we're trying to attract more designers and design feedback, just like we do for coding. We're also trying to document UX standards (see https://developer.gimp.org/core/ for early work) so there'll be a consistent experience as new developers join and features are added.
Is there any long form articles on the GIMP UI? I see it time and time again people complaining about Gimps UI. Personally I've used Gimp on and off for like 25 years but i find it hella clunky and I often need to google how to do basic stuff. Also been using photoshop since v3 and I know it well enough to get by.
I see some discussion on the copy paste. Funnily enough i was copy pasting stuff yesterday in Gimp and yeah there is something funky that I couldn't put my finger on. It makes the app feel really janky clicking here and ther doesn't work, renaming the pasted layer. do i click once ? double click? hit enter? I coudln't work it out as the behaviour seemed inconsistent. I also couldn't work out how to get a pasted layer to align to top left. I had to align it manually every time. sigh.
anyway is ther any decent articles that discuss this anywhere that someone could link me?
a) Solution X does it generally better than Y and their solution is *ported*.
b) Adapt to solution Y. The end.
Most of the time it is b. Because Vim shall not be Emacs. Linux shall not be Windows. And macOS shall not be Windows either.
Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming. And Apple also. Custom theming is a horrible mess aside from areas where it is intentionally (e.g. Vim color schemes).
But it is also possible that Gimp moves to option A. At some point and they are interested in user-interface improvements. Most people just want to use Single-Window-Mode which shall be default for many years.
c) There's a sane, standard way of doing things that everybody is familiar with, but you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way, and if anyone has anything to say about it they're "free to fork" and you "don't owe anyone anything", but despite that, everyone should use your thing because it's free and you're the good guy, and otherwise they're supporting the empire of evil.
This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp - sane UI that's way closer to Photoshop. You need to rebind 5 things and you can use it.
> Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming
Same deal. What do you care what I do with my computer? GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default, but very few people pick it when they have the choice. It will be dead in 10 years.
> you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way
Perhaps there's a good reason why a developer or a group of developers decide to do things a certain way.
> This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp
Aside from the fact that these programs are intended for pretty different things, the impression I have is that GIMP has a much larger install-base than Krita and more people are aware of it. Far from "sweeping the floor".
> GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default
Or perhaps some people (and enterprises) want a polished OOTB desktop experience without having to deal with KDE's bugs and Windows-like design language. There are plenty of GNOME installs on Arch Linux for example, where you can't speak of any "defaults" with regards to desktop environments.[0]
> Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming.
In what way has GNOME killed theming? There are lots of themes available on [1] and some of the most downloaded ones are consistently imitations of the latest macOS or Windows style.
I tried GIMP out again after a decade, and I have to say I'm presently surprised with v3. I avoided it for a long time because I remember it being a super confusing interface. Every UX idiom seemed backward to me then. But today I need to do some significant compositing, repainting and correction sporadically, and I'm tired of the Adobe tax. Maybe coupled with AI research, I've been quickly able to figure out everything I need to do.
You might be happy to learn that GIMP is a lot better on Mac with the 3.0 release than it was before. When I started using a Mac in 2022 I was a bit heartbroken at broken bits of the UI. I started using Affinity as a compromise, but its UX was just too janky and slow for me compared to GIMP.
Some things are wonky though (ctrl+ keybindings instead of cmd+ keybindings) but it's much better. I use it every day now.
So I guess that yesterday's questions "Where is vibecoded Photoshop?" just got answered with a vibecoded Gimp UI that looks like Photoshop ;) but seriously, nice work!
How do we get this into mainline GIMP? As a GIMP user since it existed, I can say that the default interface "works" but the ux isn't great. This looks like a marked improvement and would give me something more like Inkscapes UI but for raster images instead of vector...
Possibly as part of our in-progress extension platform. The extension infrastructure is already built (e.g. you could package the theme as .gex file and have GIMP recognize it), and we have a GSoC student working on some aspects of it (at the moment, the submission workflow for an online repo of extensions). Once it's ready, we could reach out to the developers of PhotoGIMP and see if they'd be willing to have it included as part of the initial extensions repo - then you could pull it into GIMP directly.
I thought they were already heading in that direction with the single window mode merging. But ok sure I guess they'll never change anything because a sister project existed 2 decades ago or whatever.
Does this fix the layers palette? Last I knew, in stock GIMP the way it operates is utterly bizarre, supporting none of the multi-select interactions that have been stock in scrolling list views across platforms since the 90s.
The argument over the UI in GIMP and Photoshop is actually based on the kind of "false" premise that Photoshop has a "superior" UI.
It reminds of my first experience using macOS, as a long time Windows user. The first few months on macOS was a totally frustrating and negative experience for me - "What the ...? why does the ENTER key not open files or folders? Why is it going to 'rename' mode? Why doesn't double-clicking the title bar on a window maximise the window? Why are some windows maximised and others take their own custom width? Why is the Maximise button making apps full screen!?" - and so on.
The point is that I had become so familiar with the Windows UI, that every other OS UI suddenly seemed alien - "This is not how a UI should work on an OS". (This was also the reason that I hated Ubuntu's DE, as it tried to imitate the macOS UI I was then unfamiliar with). Familiarity means when you face a new UI, you have to spend effort to re-learn your way of thinking around a UI, which can be a frustrating experience (especially as you grow older). That effort / stress also unconsciously creates a negative impression in your mind about the UI. Both Apple and Microsoft know this and that is why they deliberately make their UI distinct and different from each other - whether it is Windows vs macOS or Windows Phone vs ios. Recently someone (a non-geek) asked me if they should buy a Macbook as they had an iPhone too. As they were a Windows user, I warned them that the macOS UI would be frustrating and to try macOS before committing to it. They did, and ultimately decided against it and chose to stick to Windows (buying a Surface Tablet).
As a former graphic designer, and an experienced Photoshop user, I only considered GIMP as a replacement when Adobe decided to make it a subscription. And just as with Windows to macOS, re-learning to use the GIMP UI was a frustrating experience because I was always thinking of "this is how it is done in Photoshop". Once you let go of that "familiarity", and are willing to actually test if the "GIMP way" is maybe better, it becomes a less frustrating experience. (All that said, while I have got used to using the GIMP tools the GIMP way, the overall GIMP layout does have a cluttered feeling and I do recommend installing Photo GIMP - it won't really make GIMP a Photoshop clone, but it will make it more "familiar" and thus easier to "re-learn" how to use it).
I grew up using Paint Shop Pro, so I'm not familiar with either. I've recently had to start using both Photoshop and GIMP (Photoshop because the best tool for descreening printed documents is the Sattva Descreen Photoshop plugin, GIMP because I've largely switched to Linux). GIMP is not like most software. With Photoshop, there's tons of functionality but I can usually figure out what to do by poking around in the menus and hovering at the icons in the toolbar. With GIMP, I have to keep looking online for how to do basic things, and the program keeps behaving in unusual ways.
For example, let's say I added a text block to an image. I then select the text layer, there's a box drawn around the text, and I try moving the text around with the move tool. In every other image editor I've used, this will move the text around, but in GIMP this will move the background layer around unless you specifically click on the text and not just inside the box (which can be difficult depending on the font you used). Every aspect of using GIMP works like this. Everything is implemented in a counterintuitive manner. The closest analogue I can think of is it's like figuring out how to play old versions of Dwarf Fortress from before they overhauled the UI for the Steam release.
That's an option on the Move tool, whether to move the current layer or the thing you clicked on.
As someone who has never used Photoshop, I've always found Gimp to be pretty intuitive, and reading some of the complaints on here I expect I'd find Photoshop strange and unintuitive. For example, one of the comparisons above is about copy/paste, but from their description the Gimp version is much closer to how copy/paste works in general, where you have to paste to create the new copy before you can manipulate it.
The micro-interactions and hotkeys in GIMP are just so poor though.
For example, basic stuff like zoom in and zoom out are bound differently to literally any other app on any platform. This catches me out every single time I try to use it, and I'll never learn the GIMP way.
Spoiler for anyone unfamiliar: it's not Ctrl+/Ctrl-.
I never used Photoshop, it was easy to use other advanced tools such as Davinci Resolve, Darktable etc. But Gimp is just horrible. Even when you don't compare it to Photoshop.
I don't think it's that PS has a better UI it's that so many people spent years in it because it became the de facto standard in graphic design work. Given the choice between doing work and learning a totally different interface so you can do work is choice many people won't make.
I feel like people saying that they're too used to photoshops UI/UX to switch is more of a dig on adobe than GIMP. Your entire skillset being non-transferable simply because of how hard photoshop is to learn and unlearn must mean adobe is in deep UX hell
Gimp is shit. It has always been shit and likely will always be shit. The UI is made by Satan himself and it is much closer to Paint than to Photoshop in terms of feature coverage.
It is a selling point for me. Photopea can be closed tomorrow, and it will disappear from the face of the Earth. GIMP will never disappear, as it can be downloaded and forked, has no DRM like Photoshop, no ads, runs anywhere.
And Photopea does indeed have ads, and "No Ads" is one of the "features" of the premium subscription, as you can check by going to the account page.
Time to bring back again the (true) story of when I was working at uni and they were looking for another graphic designer to join our team. Boss told us one of the candidates refused to do the test because the computer didn't have Photoshop installed. All they needed to do with an image editor was to crop an image.
I really think most people use Photoshop for the same reason they use Windows - they don't really know/they don't want to learn anything else.
The company absolutely failed the test. If they're not using industry standard tools then it's a sign they don't take the role seriously. That would be a huge red flag to me.
It's like applying to be developer and being told to use Microsoft FrontPage. It's doable, but raises serious questions about the professionalism of the organisation.
Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
er.. no - I've been a daily user of Photoshop since '98 or so, but after getting annoyed with Adobe's subscription model a few years back I bought Affinity Photo and looked to move over entirely to that, yet I ended up back in Photoshop purely because of literal decades of muscle memory meant that every interaction that I had with Affinity's offering came with an undesirable cognitive speedbump.
I'm not a fan of Gimp (haven't given it a shot in over a decade, to be fair) but if it covers the basic capabilities of PS and provides for an almost straight swap for users looking to change, then it is literally the layout and shortcuts that will be the decider for them.
Seems like you're actually agreeing. What you're attached to is all the work you put into learning Photoshop, not the particular UI of Photoshop. Learning GIMP is throwing hundreds or thousands of hours of work into the trash. IMO, learning GIMP is going to be a lot easier, though, because it's logically organized - it's easy to guess where things will be.
That's always going to be a problem with switching from anything to anything other than a clone. I can't play superior, I'm still clinging to MATE for goodness's sake, but at least I know I'm being dumb and have plans to move.
Define 'logically organised' in the context of 'a creative' using a piece of software?
Back in the Mac vs. PC days, people would argue themselves blue in the face about which system was the 'more logical' with the non-answer essentially boiling down to the extent of one's experience and the preference of one's capacity to plumb the depths of the preferred OS.
Here, we're discussing a means for people who might otherwise not have any desire to use GIMP being able to use GIMP without having to throw said thousands of hours of experience. Whether they then want to transition to a GIMP-first comprehension of the software is another matter entirely.
This gets rid of the speedbump.
Unfortunately, it doesnt get rid of the singularly-offputting name, but that's a matter for another thread.
>I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)
It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...
This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.
I highly doubt that. Photoshop, even for 95% of users, is pretty heavy on non-destructive editing. GIMP did not have that for a very long time and is no where near feature parity today AFAIK.
Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.
Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...
I have talked to plenty of people for which Krita was their preferred Photoshop replacement.
Photoshop does a lot of advanced editing well, but that's a feature many professionals don't really need. It's a bit like Excel: whole companies have moved from Excel to Google Docs, but many companies will never be able to use anything else because only Excel manages to render their VBA-sheet-database monstrosities correctly.
Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.
What version of GIMP are you running? Stable GIMP at this point (at least by our definition) is GIMP 3.2, which definitely has this feature. If you've been using 2.10 or earlier, then yeah, it wouldn't be in there.
Considering their own bugtracker had them 14 years ago claiming adjustment layers were not useful and it's taken them over a decade to get that absolutely essential feature in only recently in a very weird way I don't think anywhere near 95% of the features are there.
Although that is true, moving to a different application with different layout, naming conventions, and shortcuts is difficult. That is the use case this project addresses.
The disadvantage is that then you never learn how GIMP works and will forever frustrated it's not Photoshop. Sometimes it's better to take the hard way.
Gimp is unintuitive for a lot of people including myself. I've tried it for years and just don't like the way it works. Forcing people to do it your way is not always the best way. This is an option, it's not forced on anyone and it's great for those that want to transition. People have requested it for years.
When I first started using emacs, I bounced off of spacemacs because it was all very unfamiliar and confusing, with a lot of its own terminology added on to emacs’. I tried again later with doom emacs and, maybe because of some familiarity gained in the spacemacs run, managed to make it stick.
A year or two ago, I ditched doom and rolled my own emacs config, having gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to do so from my years with doom.
Both doom and spacemacs exist to make the (relatively) strange nature of emacs more welcoming to users of other IDEs. I’m not sure I would have stuck with it without them, so I’m not sure the hard way is always better.
Could be useful. GIMP never had a, to me, useful interface.
Back when they added "export as" in addition to "save as",
I told them to please don't do this. Their response was
that they want to appeal more to professional designers.
I just want a simpler user interface. It is kind of strange
that we, as users, depend on upstream developers dictating
down UI choices onto us, even more so when things change
between versions. I want to be able to choose the UI at all
times on my own. Yes, I can patch the source code, but I
mean something integrated into the toolkit, as-is. GTK2
had that to a limited extend, you could easily re-assign
key combinations, such as in the old bluefish editor. Then
GTK3 changed this. I feel that these toolkits are constantly
getting worse rather than better over time. One day we need
to free ourselves from upstream developers dictating whatever
they like to. So, from this point of view, best of luck to the
photogimp folks - not sure how well it works, but they make a
point with this that I totally understand. (I also have to admit
that I often just stick to the default, even though it annoys me,
but keeping up with more and more microchanges on my own, also
adds to my own burden and time investment. But I really wish I
could stop having to accept whatever upstream dictates downstream.)
I really hate [edit: the necessity for something like] this. I deeply disagree that Photoshop has better UI than GIMP, it's just that GIMP is no professional's daily driver, you were paid to learn Photoshop; and whenever you learned any technique, you learned it in Photoshop. Clinging to Photoshop UI (which is completely arbitrary and bizarre) just supports Photoshop - you're taking a vacation instead of making a move.
That being said, the comfort that millions of people have with the Photoshop interface is in itself an institution, and has to be respected as such (imagine the collective number of man-hours put into learning it.) I don't know what the answer is. But the worst possible outcome is the Firefox outcome, where GIMP ends up chasing Photoshop rather than remaining its own thing.
Just, please, try to get out of your head that GIMP's UI is bad. It's not, it's just different. Don't think of it as a knock-off Photoshop. Deal with it on its own terms. Use these Photoshop skins as a transition rather than a destination.
That means I might have a problem with this approach, just because it doesn't allow for a easy switch between classic and Photoshop UI. It's actually annoying to switch back and forth. If it catches on and brings more users to GIMP, it will become the interface, and leave GIMP vulnerable to IP attacks.
The problem is not that GIMP has a different UI to photoshop. That's not a problem. Premier and Final Cut Pro have different UIs, and while there's some friendly banter about which is better most people agree that either work.
The GIMP community has utterly failed to understand that the problem with their UI is not that it's different from one particular competitor, it's that it breaks all user expectations about how GUI software should behave. A simple copy/paste operation between layers requires googling before a new user is able to do it - and all to save utterly trivial amounts of RAM. That's not "just different", that's objectively terrible.
It's different not in an apples to oranges way, it's like apples to dried squid.
GIMP is/was very much an acquired taste and pretty tough to learn compared to modern UI standards. Photoshop is not perfect or easy, but it's "normal".
I probably won’t bother to try this because I think it’s unlikely that it fixes whatever is broken in Gimp that prevents me from using it. I use DWM. Gimp simply doesn’t work with that window manager. I won’t bore you with details, but other users of DWM or, possibly, similar WMs know what I mean.
It’s not DWM’s fault. It works fine with programs that support X11 properly. Krita, for example, works perfectly with DWM.
The difference is that git was among the best-in-class and developed and used by the people behind Linux, and that the word 'git' wasn't as offensive as 'gimp'.
If GIMP had feature-parity with Photoshop, and had been adopted by Condé Nast or ILM, and had a less-offensive name like "Dumm" or "Silly Image Editor", then this would be more comparable.
I hear that objection and it's a decent one, but that one just isn't as well known. Even as an American, I'm not thrilled that "offensive in America" matters more, but it does.
I have the impression that many of the people who know ‘gimp’ as a slur only do because some of the others feel a need to bring it up every single time GIMP is mentioned anywhere ever.
Respectfully, that's kind of a ridiculous "impression," easily refuted by many of us who have wanted to recommend GIMP to people.
And again, it's called "reading the room." Even if you don't care about it being "offensive" or a "slur," names still matter. Like, if the word "poop" was in the name of some otherwise good software.
> Respectfully, that's kind of a ridiculous "impression," easily refuted by many of us who have wanted to recommend GIMP to people.
Is it though? Almost every time the topic is discussed, I see someone in the comments only then learning that the word is also known by some as a slur.
> Like, if the word "poop" was in the name of some otherwise good software.
Except that ‘poop’ is a common word with a single common meaning. ‘Gimp’ is not a common word and has several different meanings, one of them a slur, another kinky, and others probably innocuous (if even more uncommon). Many people (even among native English speakers, though let’s not forget about the rest of the world) only know the word as the name of the program. The two don’t really compare.
I think "Do people commonly understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word?" is the wrong question.
The right question is, "Did _enough_ people understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word to harm its adoption?" and the answer is probably yes.
The people complaining about GIMP's name are the ones who love and use it, who have seen the name cause problems. There's a modicum of grief for the counterfactual (of how much better GIMP might be if it didn't set up artificial barriers for itself), and the frustration with people who obstinately don't see the problem.
I think both questions are good to ask. Another follow-up question would be ‘how big is the damage to adoption’, since the answer could range from ‘barely perceptible’ to ‘devastating’. An answer closer to the latter would, in my opinion, make a great reason for a name change.
People who never hear about GIMP in the first place are never going to use it.
Someone asks, "How did you make that?" and your answer is PhotoShop and not GIMP. That's one less person who might use GIMP, and one less person who might introduce GIMP to other people, and so forth.
"Names don't matter" is obviously a silly stance. Pre-emptively dismissing people who disagree as "not serious" when you're taking a stance like this does not make an argument in favor of your stance.
Names are something that clearly matter to people, and that impacts anyone working with people.
While all the comments about GIMP needing a total UX overhaul etc. are likely valid, it's worth noting that there's something like 2 people working on the bulk of GIMP at the moment.
It's not a startup that has just raised a series A and opened a flashy San Francisco office.
All that is to say that I don't think the problem is the GIMP devs not knowing what the problems are and needing them explained over and over again.
The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
So if you can, contribute.
I guess i am not the only one who actually likes that Gimp is the same software I got used to many years ago just a lot better.
No need to relearn anytime I have to edit something.
I think there is room for both approaches. Like it or not, photoshop/adobe is the defacto standard everything else is measured from. A compatibility layer like Inkscape does for illustrator has for PS-like behavior is welcome to bring “industry” users in the fold.
My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.
As an outsider, trying to make some UI/UX changes in old open source projects is often extremely energy consuming and difficult. You have to convince all the old hands, who feel it's their project (maybe rightfully so) that the changes are good for new users. Old users will mostly fight any change (don't want to relearn). Many discussions end with "maybe let's make this a setting?". This leads to crappy software with bad defaults, way too many options and nobody will ever use the new settings.
Even though I have a background in UX design, I'm not cut out for this kind of open source work. I've tried.
LibreOffice did a great job of transitioning to an alternative UX and went further to implement not just ribbons but different combinations classic menu with ribbons.
That's the answer IMO, yeah now there's two UX to maintain but it's a step forward.
Another outsider, but Krita seem to be doing really well keeping their UX up to date. To the point where I often use it for a lot of stuff meant to be done by GIMP
After the attitude displayed by those developers towards e.g. opening jpegs and saving GIMP format files, I don’t think I’m interested in contributing and have replaced using GIMP with Paint.Net and Corel.
I feel like people working on things for free can be cut a little bit of slack and not always be policed about any random person not linking their 'attitude' for some comment on a PR they made or whatnot.
But I guess it's easier to come up with reasons for not contributing than actually contributing.
> The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.
> So if you can, contribute.
Well, that requires knowledge of C. That already excludes like 98% of the user base or so, or perhaps 90%.
Also, even aside from this, if a majority wants feature xyz but you don't like that, what can you do? It is a constant time investment to convince a majority that what they want may not be great.
You make it sound as if the only bottleneck is lack of developers. I think there are many more bottlenecks than merely lack of developers.
Agreed, I think the bottlenecks are often the gate keepers already in the community. In fact one of the other replies to the parent indicates that mentality. Where they are happy that GIMP has remained unchanged and are happy with the UI. This is exactly the kind of sentiment that often makes progress become stagnant. The small vocal community gets used to things like poor UI, and then turns into a NIMBY about any changes that would benefit the masses (but require them learning new things).
Unfortunately I think this is why most of the time you don't see progress in applications like this until there is a fork or a whole new application. Especially with AI based development now, I think the problem is often not the lacking people to make code, but lacking people that allow the code to be contributed in the first place.
like the ffmpeg teams said "Send Patches"
I've never understood GIMP's approach to copy paste either. They've made a decision that copy and paste must require as many un-intuitive steps as possible.
Most graphics programs let you select a region, copy it and then move the copy around to where you want it, the end. You can usually paste into new layer if needed.
But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.
This kind of thing just makes me use other software.
That's how Procreate works as well. When you paste, it pastes into a new layer and then you can decide if you want to merge it down or not.
I've memorised the keyboard shortcuts that I need in order to do this extremely common thing.
1. Select region with mouse.
2. Ctrl-C: Copy the region.
3. Ctrl-V: Paste (with the selection still active, so that it pastes in the same place).
4. Ctrl-Shift-N: Makes the resulting "temporary layer" into a permanent new layer.
5. Use the new layer.
I wish I could skip step 4. It's usually not necessary, and if I need to place the temporary layer into the same layer that I was already using, I can just merge the two myself.
Of course, sometimes you do need the ability to directly paste into the same thing, such as if you're editing a layer mask rather than the actual layer itself...
Not sure what you’re seeing, but if you choose the move (four arrow button) tool after pasting, it will move the selection. Then you can create a layer or merge down etc if you wish but not required.
Slightly beyond that, pasting creates a temporary new layer you can manipulate like normal layers before anchoring it or converting it to a normal layer. It's visible in the Layers window as a separate layer from the one you were working on.
Right, “floating.”
> But not in GIMP for some reason you have to copy something and 'anchor it' or convert it to a new layer before you ever see it.
I select something, copy it, paste it, and I can see and move it right away. Is that not working for you? I’m on GIMP 3.2.2.
Copy & Paste default behavior was changed in GIMP 3.0 (I was one of the people who worked on the change). GIMP 2.10 and earlier creating floating selections as described earlier.
I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.
GIMP gets the work done. I've never had an issue I couldn't address with its tools, but it's clear the UI was crafted by coders. I'm glad for this approach.
And I'm glad to see such a simple approach to making it usable. Not a fork creating whole new problems to worry about, just reconfiguring the UI and now Bob's your uncle.
Now if GIMP would just stop rewriting the file on each run, making it difficult to keep in revision control....
i really don't mind the GIMP UI but then again I used it for a very long time, so perhaps that's why (same for PS, I'm a 1.0 user).
On the flip side, I'd love a darktable that is closer the lightroom's UI, for similar reasons. Somehow, i find it more difficult to get the same speed and flow with darktable.
>it's clear the UI was crafted by coders
Is it? Why? Looking at the screenshot on this, it just seems like a few items were moved around a bit, presumably because that's where Photoshop has them.
They were talking about GIMPs default UI.
Yeah, I was too, I'll clarify. The photoGIMP UI doesn't seem that meaningfully different than the default UI to me, to where the idea that it is then not "crafted by coders" doesn't seem to make sense to me.
I completely agree.
Every few years I give GIMP a shot, and every time I give up because it's completely inscrutable. Adobe is evil, and Pixelmator lacks features, but at least you can figure out how to use them in short order.
Every time I give Photoshop a chance I give completely up, the thing doesn't even start on neither Fedora or Ubuntu and I have no interest in configuring Wine for this. GIMP is the least painful way to get the job done. I have been using it for over 20 years, and it has been a pain-free experience. That GIMP is bad is just as wrong as the people who say Java is bad.
But you know what's even worse, people that use Illustrator to create SVG's for the web. Inkscape creates proper readable SVG's at 5KB, compared to 50MB SVG's I get from Illustrator experts.
Try on Windows 11 or macOS.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/desktop/get-started/techni...
Check out Krita, it's a much easier lift for someone used to photoshop ime.
At least, if you're doing digital art. Not as full featured for editing of photo's.
Digital artists use Photoshop for painting/drawing? I thought Photoshop was made for photo composites.
Photoshop is widely used for painting/drawing, yes. Hooking up a Wacom or similar tablet is very common.
Granted, a lot of this has moved to iPad + apple pencil since that combo was released, but Photoshop is still heavily used. Of course, you can run Photoshop on iPad, too.
I actually find the opposite. I don't actually think either of us are wrong, it probably comes down to what we got started with. I love that in Gimp layers can have totally different canvas sizes, and I prefer it's foreground select tool.
But most of all, any comparison is going to be silly. Photoshop has lots of amazing features and in sure is better in a technical comparison to Gimp in many ways.
A lot of times the best tool for the job is the one that works great for you.
1. GIMP needs a total UX overhaul
2. GIMP needs RAW support, precision support, and a better data backbone
3. GIMP needs a rename. It's both a sex kink term [1] (not to yuck anyone's yums) and a slur term for disabled people [2]
4. Gen AI will probably disrupt all of this anyway.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I8S3ZHQ
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gimp
1. I don't disagree
2. GIMP isn't a raw editor, use darktable or rawtherapee
3. Poor naming decisions do not warrant a change this late, people know GIMP
4. Keep dreaming
and what do you propose for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime search?
How would any of this apply to GIMPS?
I think you might be equivocating these on their names, but it's simply not the same. People complain about the name of GIMP because it causes them problems when trying to use it in work and school. But nobody is complaining about GIMPS name, right? It's not even software.
Your point number 3 is very irritating to read.
Why?
This comment should just be automatically posted in every GIMP thread. Then nobody else needs to post these trite points again and again and again and again.
Maybe if they're posted again and again, they're real pain points and should be addressed?
No obviously not. They are just easy to bring up without ever engaging with the actual material.
GIMP and its UI are the only material here, what are you talking about? These are pain points about GIMP that multiple people have brought up every time GIMP has been mentioned online for decades.
I say this as someone who has used GIMP for two decades now. It was the first real image editor I used, so the UI/UX is fine to me, but it's clearly a problem.
GIMP is steadfast about the name, but has been slowly incorporating UI/UX improvements since its existence. (Single window mode, canvas rotation, more consistent UI on Macs with 3.0, high DPI support, etc.) GIMP doesn't have raw support yet, but it does have high bitdepth support (both integer and floating point).
The whole point of GIMPShop and PhotoGIMP are to address these pain points.
Again, it's about 20 years too late, but the rename thing is absolutely correct and I continue to be gobsmacked by the amount of people here who don't get this, especially as I've seen this place slowly move from actually being about "hacking" to being about "tech and business."
Perception matters; Y'all are so wild for this.
While I agree, and I've been hammering this point as a GIMP user for two decades I think the "GIMP is actually a fine name" are increasingly a minority. Its name makes GIMP hostile to user adoption. Anyone who works in a primarily English-spekaing country knows what it's like to try to use GIMP at work, especially in K-12.
It's not like it was an accident, either. GIMP is a backronym because they wanted to name it after the full-body sex slave suit. They shot themselves in the face with that one.
It’s only the British (and influenced by) who have a negative view of the name. The rest of us don’t care, and wish you’d quit bringing it up.
For example there’s a juice company here in the US named ’Suja,’ and it’s obvious they have no Brazilian employees because it means dirty/obscene in Portuguese.
Simple words sometimes mean unfortunate things in other countries. Adults get over them.
This is not true, I am in America and the name has been seriously problematic.
This is not surprising, the developers were English-speaking Americans who chose a name to cause offense on purpose, in reference to the full-body sex slave suit in Pulp Fiction: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
I don't know who you claim to represent with "the rest of us", but I can only speak for the experience in America. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with me, it's a simple fact that the name GIMP has been a barrier to its adoption.
Am in California and have never heard this word used outside of the image editor, in my entire life. Not a spring chicken.
Yes, finally looked it up after listening to boring complaints for two decades. Don’t care; mildly amusing collision.
To repeat, it's not a collision, because it was not accidental. Kimball and Mattis named their image editor after the full-body sex-slave suit, on purpose. GIMP is a backronym.
It's also worth emphasizing that "Pulp Fiction" is not an obscure movie, it was actually a very very popular movie from the 1990s and it's still relevant today. It won awards from every organization that gave movies awards. It was recently quoted by the US Secretary of Defense during a prayer, who thought he was quoting the Bible.
While I believe you when you say you're personally not familiar with the usage of the word, it's a word that you can expect most people would recognize.
Do you have any evidence it was done on purpose? The devs have referenced the unfortunate name a few times but I think it is infinitely more likely they chose the name in reference to the poor quality of the software or as a normal acronym
Yes, I cited it an above comment: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
Here is the full quote:
> > Your home page says that you created GIMP to address the lack of free or inexpensive Unix graphics tools. How did you guys actually get together to tackle this? Was it like in Blues Brothers? Were you on a mission from God?
> Spencer was my brother's roommate for four years. (He's been my roommate for the past six months). So I knew who he was when we decided to take the compilers course here together. Big mistake. During one of the impossibly boring assignments we decided we wanted to do something which wouldn't suck. The idea of doing the GIMP actually fell out fairly naturally.
> 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.
Ask anyone under fifty what "pulp fiction" was and prepare to get mostly blank stares. Can barely remember it myself.
Reminds me of those creeps in "Footloose" trying to outlaw dancing. Puritanism can get fucked. ;-)
I'm gen Z, we know what Pulp Fiction is. Even the gen alphas do. We just had a crossover in Fortnite, and Pulp Fiction is in the Chainsaw Man opening.
I'm anti-Puritan as well, but there are far better hills to die on. In either case, it's moot, since "gimp" is also used as an ableist slur.
I haven't seen Footloose, but we don't need analogies to fictional movie villains. The facts are that they decided to give GIMP a stupid name, and so they missed out on investment and adoption because of that decision. It doesn't matter what you or I think, I'm just describing something that already happened.
> and Pulp Fiction is in the Chainsaw Man opening.
Not looking to assess how well-known Pulp Fiction is in any particular generation, but Chainsaw Man opening seems to have plenty of obscure references that really say more about its authors than they do about its watchers.
Sorry, a focus on thirty year old movies and "ableist slur"s puts you far outside the mainstream. These are simply not concerns of every day people, and doubly so for the half that voted tRump.
No need to apologize, you didn't know. In either case, it doesn't matter whether or not Pulp Fiction is "mainstream".
It does not matter what you think. It does not matter what I think. No amount of condescending comments online can go back and change it, the name "GIMP" has caused problems for people, including me, when trying to use it in professional and K-12 contexts.
The ways I personally learned people took offense at these words were when I was trying to use GIMP in highschool, asking if I could "use the GIMP" for a project. My instructor, a man who was paralyzed from the waist down, understandably thought I was punking him. I wouldn't learn this until later, but the most reasonable interpretation was that I was being a shithead, as many teenagers are.
When I explained "GIMP was like Photoshop but free", while Photoshop was already installed on the computers, you won't be surprised the conversation ended there and Photoshop won out.
It's not just that the name was insulting. In most peoples minds, nothing good is free, and "Free photoshop clone" was right up there with "Here's a prize for the 1,000,000th visitor" or "Download these free mouse cursors".
Thank you for this. I hate doing "offense aside" but.
Offense aside, you can still understand that this is a bad idea without bringing in the spectre of "is it offensive."
Like I'm saying elsewhere, what if it was called "Poop-edit" or similar? People would quite reasonably not believe it to be quality software, even if it was.
Poop-edit would get a laugh from me, it already did.
Yes, me too.
And also, no one would USE IT. That's my point. It really is that simple.
I'm not primarily talking about "being offended." Jokes are fine in some contexts.
I'm saying that if you want people to take your software seriously, it needs a serious name. And that the GIMP people very very stupidly missed a huge opportunity by not doing that.
I thought it was mostly Americans who cared about the name and not British, could totally be wrong though.
Individual adults absolutely do, but "systems, PR, and institutions" DO NOT, and that is the important lesson that so many people here aggressively dodge.
I personally can download this software and use it on my computer.
Now, can I recommend it to my class? Through zero fault or opinion of my own, it still might be a very bad idea for me professionally.
Maybe I don't like how sensitive people are. TOO BAD, it doesn't matter in this context.
The clowns who refuse to rename GIMP keep missing a huge opportunity.
I’ve had GIMP recommended as a free photo editing tool in many classes. Just saying that’s while you may not feel comfortable with recommending it, many others do.
> Anyone who works in a primarily English-spekaing country knows what it's like to try to use GIMP at work, especially in K-12.
Over the many times this topic was brought up here, plenty of people from English-speaking countries have said that no, they’ve never had a problem with it.
Yes, some people did have a problem with it. It's a valid point to bring up. But that does not mean their experience must have been shared by literally everyone else, or even the majority of people in similar circumstances.
That's fair, it's likely not _everybody_ would have a problem. But _enough_ people would. There are contexts where I've had no problems (e.g. in an office where every cubicle had at least one Linux machine, plenty of people had already heard of GIMP).
I think if GIMP had a different name, it would have had less friction in its adoption (or a higher "R-number"), Adobe would be less extractive (for having viable FOSS to compete with), and GIMP would have had more investment (in terms of money and dev hours). I'm certainly happy GIMP isn't completely abandoned, at the very least.
But what it DOES mean is -- okay, is it really worth it to KEEP it, or might you be able to get adoption, fans, traction, possibly more developers etc. etc. if you were to change it?
What is the strong motivation behind keeping the name and was it valid?
(No. The answer is no, it was not. There's no real good reason to keep it compared to the potential upsides.)
I would have answered differently, but I guess you were asking yourself…?
There was a short lived project to fork and rebrand under Glimpse with improved UI, but it's been inactive for years. All the links I find are forks of forks, 404s, and parked domains.
The name Glimpse has a horrible sound to it, they should have gone with something very different.
Also these tend to work when the new project has momentum and enough developers.
Sodipodi was forked to Inkscape, part of it was they wanted to change language to C++.
The momentum went to the new program.
Eh, every term for disabled people becomes a slur. Moron->idiot->retard (the latter being so unacceptable in modern speech it is labelled by the kids as "the hard r"). But you are right, we should simply not use terms for disabled people in software names. I propose "Thirty Years and Still Cannot Draw a Circle" or the hip short name :no-entry-sign: emoji.
Tangent, but it might help you avoid an embarrassing situation later on. If someone says "They called me the hard-R", they're not talking about the R-word.
"R----d" is usually just called "the R word", while "the hard R" refers specifically to the standard version of "the N word". (As opposed to "the soft A", which is sometimes used synonymous with "dude".)
That sounds preposterous, it's the same word no matter your accent. I am sticking to my version.
Hey, I'm just describing how some words are used
hard R = ends in 'a' soft R = ends in 'er' ? or am i wrong
No no, the other way around; hard R ends in 'er', and soft R ends in 'a' (despite not having an R).
3. They should rename it LIMP. Linux ....
I am glad someone is putting in this effort. Many years ago, there was another project called GIMPshop to make GIMP's interface more accessible to Photoshop users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
They taught Photoshop at school, so I found it easier to use GIMPshop than regular GIMP.
That's actually what I thought this submission was. Didn't remember what it was called, so I didn't realize PhotoGIMP wasn't GIMPshop.
It's funny that both of these kept GIMP in the name when the name itself has spawend a different fork.
I remember one renamed Glimpse but it seems they stopped working on it long ago: https://github.com/azubieta/Glimpse
Yes, none of the forks have succeeded so PS interface compatibility may not be as important as is constantly mentioned.
There was also an effort called Glimpse around 2019 to be a UX / accessibility overhaul of GIMP along with a name change to be less offensive, see:
- https://github.com/joshgiesbrecht/Glimpse
- https://web.archive.org/web/20190829115212/https://getglimps...
Looks like the last release was from over a year ago and the issues indicated it no longer works with the latest GIMP release.
GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use.
> GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use
Agreed. I'm already willing to use GIMP in its current state. But though I've used it since I was a child, I have to re-google for things I know it can do.
I had a photo of a barn. I was going to construct it in miniature, so to get scale measurements I wanted an isometric perspective from a photo that had been taken at an angle. I had done this in GIMP before so I was hesitant to start googling for answers but in 25 minutes of playing with it, no combination of inputs would do what I wanted. I had to find some youtube tutorials.
Even simple tasks aren't simple. Annotating a photograph with a couple red arrows is a multi step challenge involving paths, stroking, selections, layers, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting. These UI concepts were impenetrable without tutorials -- I never would have figured this out on my own.
GIMP has helped me but it's never been pleasant to use.
For what it's worth, there is a built-in arrow brush in GIMP 3.2 (we updated the MyPaint brushes engine and got it for free as a result).
You can draw arrows with the pencil or paintbrush.
Not if you're a professional in a big boy company, where the MacOS users can literally draw a perfect arrow in 2 seconds on any image, without installing a thing. You're just going to look completely incompetent.
This is not a significant concern of anyone I've met, and if it was I'd look at them as incompetent.
Another lesson GIMP could take from Blender is the importance of a python REPL that updates with the analog commands to the menu items you're clicking. GIMP allows scripting from some kind of lisp, but in many hours of attempt I've never gotten it to do what I know it can do. But I was effective in blender within seconds because it allowed me to directly translate my actions to code.
GIMP has a Python console, and several built-in plug-ins are written in Python: https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/gimp-filters-python-fu.html
We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.
I used the python API in GIMP headless early on in my career, was pretty handy.
Blender also had a comparatively large amount of money backing these changes, if I remember correctly, which I expect GIMP does not. I suppose a lesson in that area would be required first. However, the others like Krita might be better positioned for this.
the only possible lesson from blender I see is "receive millions of dollars a year from corporations"
I tried using gimp on Mac to do some extremely basic stuff. I just wanted multiple layers to make a little mock up at work. Gimp’s mental model is unintuitive to me, I got so frustrated trying get anything done. I gave up and bought acorn for Mac to make my basic little image.
Gimp will never be able to pull a Blender because they are operating on hugely different conditions.
Blender never had to play catch up with a proprietary file format. In Blender's world, fbx and any of the video formats are the way to interop with other studios.
In the Photoshop/Gimp world, the interop format is psd. Under full control of Adobe.
There is also the matter of price. Maya and 3dStudioMax are eye watering expensive, while Photoshop is dirt cheap. As a professional photographer, I can get the 300 GBP it costs me to have Lightroom and Photoshop for one year, in an afternoon.
Krita is so much more accessible than GIMP.
Only Gimp devs would love Gimps interface.
Just the existence of Gimp seems like so much effort flushed down the toilet because of someone's bad, bad taste and incredibly poor user interface design
I think the biggest problem is they shoved it all into one window when it was designed to be a multi-window editor
But how good is Krita with photo manipulation and composites? I don't want to paint, I want to edit images.
Krita is not very good for photo manipulation. Even basic stuff like rectangle select and selection manipulation is painful. But on a project I used Krita, Gimp, and Inkscape all at the same time, and it was fine. Different tools for different purposes. Though with Gimp 3 having better font/text behavior, and overall allowing to build a pipeline of effects instead of immediately applying them (aka non-destructive editing), I could probably drop Inkscape now.
Pretty sure there has been various efforts to do this, but they all eventually stall due to being unable to keep up with the GIMP source. I hope this time they're taking an approach that will allow them to keep up with the maintenance.
Thank you so so much!
I cant stand Gimp UI, so not intuitive. And over 25 years of Photoshop use has me locked into a way that image editing should work. This is fantastic and timely.
After 25 years of Photoshop, is it really intuition, or is it just habit?
Habit, shortcut memory and more. But, it’s not 100% that, gimp over complicates itself.
It's cool that you can customize GIMP like that!
I never really had an issue with the program UI, though. Maybe because I also never went through the trouble of pirating/buying Photoshop to get used to it. Their new effects system (where they have to be applied and sit on top of the layer until then) was pretty bugged on release on Windows, though.
I'm sure it's a bit like for people who are used to Blender, whereas others find their interface... unique as well.
Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).
However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.
The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.
[1] https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...
Gimp has nothing like the interface deviations Blender did, like right click selection, etc. So there isn’t anything of that scale to fix.
Far from it - we even have a dedicated design site where we ask for UX-specific bug reports and improvement requests from users: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...
We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!
Ah design by committee, that well known route to design excellence!
I believe it's a step up from "design by whichever developer implemented a particular feature", which was the norm. :)
More seriously, we're trying to attract more designers and design feedback, just like we do for coding. We're also trying to document UX standards (see https://developer.gimp.org/core/ for early work) so there'll be a consistent experience as new developers join and features are added.
Is there any long form articles on the GIMP UI? I see it time and time again people complaining about Gimps UI. Personally I've used Gimp on and off for like 25 years but i find it hella clunky and I often need to google how to do basic stuff. Also been using photoshop since v3 and I know it well enough to get by.
I see some discussion on the copy paste. Funnily enough i was copy pasting stuff yesterday in Gimp and yeah there is something funky that I couldn't put my finger on. It makes the app feel really janky clicking here and ther doesn't work, renaming the pasted layer. do i click once ? double click? hit enter? I coudln't work it out as the behaviour seemed inconsistent. I also couldn't work out how to get a pasted layer to align to top left. I had to align it manually every time. sigh.
anyway is ther any decent articles that discuss this anywhere that someone could link me?
I see usually two options:
Most of the time it is b. Because Vim shall not be Emacs. Linux shall not be Windows. And macOS shall not be Windows either.Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming. And Apple also. Custom theming is a horrible mess aside from areas where it is intentionally (e.g. Vim color schemes).
But it is also possible that Gimp moves to option A. At some point and they are interested in user-interface improvements. Most people just want to use Single-Window-Mode which shall be default for many years.
c) There's a sane, standard way of doing things that everybody is familiar with, but you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way, and if anyone has anything to say about it they're "free to fork" and you "don't owe anyone anything", but despite that, everyone should use your thing because it's free and you're the good guy, and otherwise they're supporting the empire of evil.
This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp - sane UI that's way closer to Photoshop. You need to rebind 5 things and you can use it.
> Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming
Same deal. What do you care what I do with my computer? GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default, but very few people pick it when they have the choice. It will be dead in 10 years.
This is a lot of very confident assertions.
> you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way
Perhaps there's a good reason why a developer or a group of developers decide to do things a certain way.
> This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp
Aside from the fact that these programs are intended for pretty different things, the impression I have is that GIMP has a much larger install-base than Krita and more people are aware of it. Far from "sweeping the floor".
> GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default
Or perhaps some people (and enterprises) want a polished OOTB desktop experience without having to deal with KDE's bugs and Windows-like design language. There are plenty of GNOME installs on Arch Linux for example, where you can't speak of any "defaults" with regards to desktop environments.[0]
[0] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/cur...
Oh wow, I wasn't aware how small the share of GNOME usage is on Arch. The trend is clear too. Case in point, it seems.
Second place is small?
17% for GNOME, when KDE gets 41%? Yes, that's surprisingly low.
> Do you remember that foolish Windows-Themes on Linux? Luckily GNOME has killed custom theming.
In what way has GNOME killed theming? There are lots of themes available on [1] and some of the most downloaded ones are consistently imitations of the latest macOS or Windows style.
[1] https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=rating
Custom themes for DEs and the like are fairly important for accessibility.
How long will this one last? Just learn the GIMP interface, it's not great but not being photoshop isn't a bug
I tried GIMP out again after a decade, and I have to say I'm presently surprised with v3. I avoided it for a long time because I remember it being a super confusing interface. Every UX idiom seemed backward to me then. But today I need to do some significant compositing, repainting and correction sporadically, and I'm tired of the Adobe tax. Maybe coupled with AI research, I've been quickly able to figure out everything I need to do.
GIMP is the only program that I miss when switched from linux to mac. And GIMP 2.2 was just a perfect for my needs back then
You might be happy to learn that GIMP is a lot better on Mac with the 3.0 release than it was before. When I started using a Mac in 2022 I was a bit heartbroken at broken bits of the UI. I started using Affinity as a compromise, but its UX was just too janky and slow for me compared to GIMP.
Some things are wonky though (ctrl+ keybindings instead of cmd+ keybindings) but it's much better. I use it every day now.
Krita is also available on MacOS, but unsure if pen pressure sensitivity works on the platform. =3
https://krita.org/en/download/
There's a mac build for GIMP: https://download.gimp.org/gimp/v3.2/macos/gimp-3.2.4-arm64.d...
Yes there are but is just not the same, controls are quite non intuitive, I often got glitches on rendering, so overall UX for me is pretty bad
> so overall UX for me is pretty bad
That's just normal gimp
Wait what? i've been using gimp on mac without issues.
So I guess that yesterday's questions "Where is vibecoded Photoshop?" just got answered with a vibecoded Gimp UI that looks like Photoshop ;) but seriously, nice work!
How do we get this into mainline GIMP? As a GIMP user since it existed, I can say that the default interface "works" but the ux isn't great. This looks like a marked improvement and would give me something more like Inkscapes UI but for raster images instead of vector...
Possibly as part of our in-progress extension platform. The extension infrastructure is already built (e.g. you could package the theme as .gex file and have GIMP recognize it), and we have a GSoC student working on some aspects of it (at the moment, the submission workflow for an online repo of extensions). Once it's ready, we could reach out to the developers of PhotoGIMP and see if they'd be willing to have it included as part of the initial extensions repo - then you could pull it into GIMP directly.
If they were going to mimic a more Photoshop-like UI by default, they would've done it. GIMPshop was around over two decades ago
I thought they were already heading in that direction with the single window mode merging. But ok sure I guess they'll never change anything because a sister project existed 2 decades ago or whatever.
Does this fix the layers palette? Last I knew, in stock GIMP the way it operates is utterly bizarre, supporting none of the multi-select interactions that have been stock in scrolling list views across platforms since the 90s.
...before any of this matters though:
- is non-destructive editing implemented yet in GIMP?
- is stability finally improved, can I running without a never ending crashfest on both ubuntu and macos?
bc tbh the UI was never the issue for GIMP, it just wasn't good enough software.
The argument over the UI in GIMP and Photoshop is actually based on the kind of "false" premise that Photoshop has a "superior" UI.
It reminds of my first experience using macOS, as a long time Windows user. The first few months on macOS was a totally frustrating and negative experience for me - "What the ...? why does the ENTER key not open files or folders? Why is it going to 'rename' mode? Why doesn't double-clicking the title bar on a window maximise the window? Why are some windows maximised and others take their own custom width? Why is the Maximise button making apps full screen!?" - and so on.
The point is that I had become so familiar with the Windows UI, that every other OS UI suddenly seemed alien - "This is not how a UI should work on an OS". (This was also the reason that I hated Ubuntu's DE, as it tried to imitate the macOS UI I was then unfamiliar with). Familiarity means when you face a new UI, you have to spend effort to re-learn your way of thinking around a UI, which can be a frustrating experience (especially as you grow older). That effort / stress also unconsciously creates a negative impression in your mind about the UI. Both Apple and Microsoft know this and that is why they deliberately make their UI distinct and different from each other - whether it is Windows vs macOS or Windows Phone vs ios. Recently someone (a non-geek) asked me if they should buy a Macbook as they had an iPhone too. As they were a Windows user, I warned them that the macOS UI would be frustrating and to try macOS before committing to it. They did, and ultimately decided against it and chose to stick to Windows (buying a Surface Tablet).
As a former graphic designer, and an experienced Photoshop user, I only considered GIMP as a replacement when Adobe decided to make it a subscription. And just as with Windows to macOS, re-learning to use the GIMP UI was a frustrating experience because I was always thinking of "this is how it is done in Photoshop". Once you let go of that "familiarity", and are willing to actually test if the "GIMP way" is maybe better, it becomes a less frustrating experience. (All that said, while I have got used to using the GIMP tools the GIMP way, the overall GIMP layout does have a cluttered feeling and I do recommend installing Photo GIMP - it won't really make GIMP a Photoshop clone, but it will make it more "familiar" and thus easier to "re-learn" how to use it).
I grew up using Paint Shop Pro, so I'm not familiar with either. I've recently had to start using both Photoshop and GIMP (Photoshop because the best tool for descreening printed documents is the Sattva Descreen Photoshop plugin, GIMP because I've largely switched to Linux). GIMP is not like most software. With Photoshop, there's tons of functionality but I can usually figure out what to do by poking around in the menus and hovering at the icons in the toolbar. With GIMP, I have to keep looking online for how to do basic things, and the program keeps behaving in unusual ways.
For example, let's say I added a text block to an image. I then select the text layer, there's a box drawn around the text, and I try moving the text around with the move tool. In every other image editor I've used, this will move the text around, but in GIMP this will move the background layer around unless you specifically click on the text and not just inside the box (which can be difficult depending on the font you used). Every aspect of using GIMP works like this. Everything is implemented in a counterintuitive manner. The closest analogue I can think of is it's like figuring out how to play old versions of Dwarf Fortress from before they overhauled the UI for the Steam release.
That's an option on the Move tool, whether to move the current layer or the thing you clicked on.
As someone who has never used Photoshop, I've always found Gimp to be pretty intuitive, and reading some of the complaints on here I expect I'd find Photoshop strange and unintuitive. For example, one of the comparisons above is about copy/paste, but from their description the Gimp version is much closer to how copy/paste works in general, where you have to paste to create the new copy before you can manipulate it.
The micro-interactions and hotkeys in GIMP are just so poor though.
For example, basic stuff like zoom in and zoom out are bound differently to literally any other app on any platform. This catches me out every single time I try to use it, and I'll never learn the GIMP way.
Spoiler for anyone unfamiliar: it's not Ctrl+/Ctrl-.
I never used Photoshop, it was easy to use other advanced tools such as Davinci Resolve, Darktable etc. But Gimp is just horrible. Even when you don't compare it to Photoshop.
I don't think it's that PS has a better UI it's that so many people spent years in it because it became the de facto standard in graphic design work. Given the choice between doing work and learning a totally different interface so you can do work is choice many people won't make.
I feel like people saying that they're too used to photoshops UI/UX to switch is more of a dig on adobe than GIMP. Your entire skillset being non-transferable simply because of how hard photoshop is to learn and unlearn must mean adobe is in deep UX hell
Why is this not called Pimp?
Because PNNU’s Not Not Unix.
Gimp is shit. It has always been shit and likely will always be shit. The UI is made by Satan himself and it is much closer to Paint than to Photoshop in terms of feature coverage.
There's absolutely no reason to use Gimp when https://www.photopea.com/ exists.
There's no reason to use GIMP when a closed-source ad ridden web app with premium AI features exists?
Open-source is not a selling point and I'm amazed that some people still consider it as such in 2026.
I have absolutely no ads on Photopea.
Gimp doesn't have any AI feature, and you're free to not use any of the Photopea AI features, so not sure why it's relevant?
Yes, we indeed don't need Gimp when we have a free Photoshop equivalent.
It is a selling point for me. Photopea can be closed tomorrow, and it will disappear from the face of the Earth. GIMP will never disappear, as it can be downloaded and forked, has no DRM like Photoshop, no ads, runs anywhere.
And Photopea does indeed have ads, and "No Ads" is one of the "features" of the premium subscription, as you can check by going to the account page.
[dead]
I prefer Pixlr.com myself (basically because it's Adobe Photoshop without the Adobe aspect).
People use Photoshop for sheer capability, not for the layout, naming conventions and shortcuts.
Time to bring back again the (true) story of when I was working at uni and they were looking for another graphic designer to join our team. Boss told us one of the candidates refused to do the test because the computer didn't have Photoshop installed. All they needed to do with an image editor was to crop an image.
I really think most people use Photoshop for the same reason they use Windows - they don't really know/they don't want to learn anything else.
I maybe like this candidate - the "company" failed the test and the candidate moved on. :-)
The company absolutely failed the test. If they're not using industry standard tools then it's a sign they don't take the role seriously. That would be a huge red flag to me.
It's like applying to be developer and being told to use Microsoft FrontPage. It's doable, but raises serious questions about the professionalism of the organisation.
“Industry standard tools” can be translated as I’ve been captured and/or a paid shill.
That’s an insane take.
Truth is stranger than fiction, especially 2026+. Lock-in is powerful and you dove in head first.
Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
er.. no - I've been a daily user of Photoshop since '98 or so, but after getting annoyed with Adobe's subscription model a few years back I bought Affinity Photo and looked to move over entirely to that, yet I ended up back in Photoshop purely because of literal decades of muscle memory meant that every interaction that I had with Affinity's offering came with an undesirable cognitive speedbump.
I'm not a fan of Gimp (haven't given it a shot in over a decade, to be fair) but if it covers the basic capabilities of PS and provides for an almost straight swap for users looking to change, then it is literally the layout and shortcuts that will be the decider for them.
Seems like you're actually agreeing. What you're attached to is all the work you put into learning Photoshop, not the particular UI of Photoshop. Learning GIMP is throwing hundreds or thousands of hours of work into the trash. IMO, learning GIMP is going to be a lot easier, though, because it's logically organized - it's easy to guess where things will be.
That's always going to be a problem with switching from anything to anything other than a clone. I can't play superior, I'm still clinging to MATE for goodness's sake, but at least I know I'm being dumb and have plans to move.
Define 'logically organised' in the context of 'a creative' using a piece of software?
Back in the Mac vs. PC days, people would argue themselves blue in the face about which system was the 'more logical' with the non-answer essentially boiling down to the extent of one's experience and the preference of one's capacity to plumb the depths of the preferred OS.
Here, we're discussing a means for people who might otherwise not have any desire to use GIMP being able to use GIMP without having to throw said thousands of hours of experience. Whether they then want to transition to a GIMP-first comprehension of the software is another matter entirely.
This gets rid of the speedbump.
Unfortunately, it doesnt get rid of the singularly-offputting name, but that's a matter for another thread.
I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)
>I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)
It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...
This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.
I don’t know if rotating text is included in this, but the latest GIMP added non-destructive layer filters.
I highly doubt that. Photoshop, even for 95% of users, is pretty heavy on non-destructive editing. GIMP did not have that for a very long time and is no where near feature parity today AFAIK.
Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.
Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...
I have talked to plenty of people for which Krita was their preferred Photoshop replacement.
Photoshop does a lot of advanced editing well, but that's a feature many professionals don't really need. It's a bit like Excel: whole companies have moved from Excel to Google Docs, but many companies will never be able to use anything else because only Excel manages to render their VBA-sheet-database monstrosities correctly.
I don't know the current status, but at least last time I checked you could not have strokes/outline on text, and afterwards change the text :(
It's such a little thing that makes gimp annoying to use. And it affects a broad audience. Wedding cards or youtube title thumbnails.
Maybe it works now. I hope.
Non destructive layer resize works now, right?
Non-destructive text outline has been around for a while now: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/11/18/gimp-2-99-14-released/#...
Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.
Huh, 2.99 does that mean it was the beta for 3.0?
Because I think i have been using stable gimp a few times over the last couple of years and not seen it.
What version of GIMP are you running? Stable GIMP at this point (at least by our definition) is GIMP 3.2, which definitely has this feature. If you've been using 2.10 or earlier, then yeah, it wouldn't be in there.
Yeah, but it being in 2.99 / 3.0 means it was only in stable gimp since 2025, so one year ago. That explains why I did not know about it.
But nice to see that they finally added it.
Considering their own bugtracker had them 14 years ago claiming adjustment layers were not useful and it's taken them over a decade to get that absolutely essential feature in only recently in a very weird way I don't think anywhere near 95% of the features are there.
I don't think it's contentious to say that the user interface is a huge part of using a program.
Although that is true, moving to a different application with different layout, naming conventions, and shortcuts is difficult. That is the use case this project addresses.
The disadvantage is that then you never learn how GIMP works and will forever frustrated it's not Photoshop. Sometimes it's better to take the hard way.
I don't want to learn how GIMP works. I want to edit photos.
Proving we're all children in adult bodies.
Gimp is unintuitive for a lot of people including myself. I've tried it for years and just don't like the way it works. Forcing people to do it your way is not always the best way. This is an option, it's not forced on anyone and it's great for those that want to transition. People have requested it for years.
When I first started using emacs, I bounced off of spacemacs because it was all very unfamiliar and confusing, with a lot of its own terminology added on to emacs’. I tried again later with doom emacs and, maybe because of some familiarity gained in the spacemacs run, managed to make it stick.
A year or two ago, I ditched doom and rolled my own emacs config, having gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to do so from my years with doom.
Both doom and spacemacs exist to make the (relatively) strange nature of emacs more welcoming to users of other IDEs. I’m not sure I would have stuck with it without them, so I’m not sure the hard way is always better.
But if you don't have the money for a photoshop license, learned photoshop, and don't want to pirate, this is a good middle ground.
Photopea is also a good solution
Photoshop is available for $20 a month on the annual Photography plan.
Could be useful. GIMP never had a, to me, useful interface.
Back when they added "export as" in addition to "save as", I told them to please don't do this. Their response was that they want to appeal more to professional designers. I just want a simpler user interface. It is kind of strange that we, as users, depend on upstream developers dictating down UI choices onto us, even more so when things change between versions. I want to be able to choose the UI at all times on my own. Yes, I can patch the source code, but I mean something integrated into the toolkit, as-is. GTK2 had that to a limited extend, you could easily re-assign key combinations, such as in the old bluefish editor. Then GTK3 changed this. I feel that these toolkits are constantly getting worse rather than better over time. One day we need to free ourselves from upstream developers dictating whatever they like to. So, from this point of view, best of luck to the photogimp folks - not sure how well it works, but they make a point with this that I totally understand. (I also have to admit that I often just stick to the default, even though it annoys me, but keeping up with more and more microchanges on my own, also adds to my own burden and time investment. But I really wish I could stop having to accept whatever upstream dictates downstream.)
[flagged]
[flagged]
Let's not start on GIT then...
[flagged]
It's an offshoot patch for the original project so the usage makes sense.
At least put disclaimer and code of conduct for got sake
Why would there need to be a code of conduct or disclaimer when it's clearly stated it's a patch for a photo editing product called gimp?
You are arguing with a bad-faith throwaway account
I really hate [edit: the necessity for something like] this. I deeply disagree that Photoshop has better UI than GIMP, it's just that GIMP is no professional's daily driver, you were paid to learn Photoshop; and whenever you learned any technique, you learned it in Photoshop. Clinging to Photoshop UI (which is completely arbitrary and bizarre) just supports Photoshop - you're taking a vacation instead of making a move.
That being said, the comfort that millions of people have with the Photoshop interface is in itself an institution, and has to be respected as such (imagine the collective number of man-hours put into learning it.) I don't know what the answer is. But the worst possible outcome is the Firefox outcome, where GIMP ends up chasing Photoshop rather than remaining its own thing.
Just, please, try to get out of your head that GIMP's UI is bad. It's not, it's just different. Don't think of it as a knock-off Photoshop. Deal with it on its own terms. Use these Photoshop skins as a transition rather than a destination.
That means I might have a problem with this approach, just because it doesn't allow for a easy switch between classic and Photoshop UI. It's actually annoying to switch back and forth. If it catches on and brings more users to GIMP, it will become the interface, and leave GIMP vulnerable to IP attacks.
The problem is not that GIMP has a different UI to photoshop. That's not a problem. Premier and Final Cut Pro have different UIs, and while there's some friendly banter about which is better most people agree that either work.
The GIMP community has utterly failed to understand that the problem with their UI is not that it's different from one particular competitor, it's that it breaks all user expectations about how GUI software should behave. A simple copy/paste operation between layers requires googling before a new user is able to do it - and all to save utterly trivial amounts of RAM. That's not "just different", that's objectively terrible.
It's different not in an apples to oranges way, it's like apples to dried squid. GIMP is/was very much an acquired taste and pretty tough to learn compared to modern UI standards. Photoshop is not perfect or easy, but it's "normal".
That's a lot of hand waving. Any specific examples?
I probably won’t bother to try this because I think it’s unlikely that it fixes whatever is broken in Gimp that prevents me from using it. I use DWM. Gimp simply doesn’t work with that window manager. I won’t bore you with details, but other users of DWM or, possibly, similar WMs know what I mean.
It’s not DWM’s fault. It works fine with programs that support X11 properly. Krita, for example, works perfectly with DWM.
I'll continue to say it; this software does not get taken seriously in a useful way to lots of people until it changes the silly name.
And to summarize and perhaps avert other discussion; it's not so much about being "non-offensive" as it is simply about being professional.
Good thing then that the most popular version control system on the planet does not have silly, unprofessional name...
The difference is that git was among the best-in-class and developed and used by the people behind Linux, and that the word 'git' wasn't as offensive as 'gimp'.
If GIMP had feature-parity with Photoshop, and had been adopted by Condé Nast or ILM, and had a less-offensive name like "Dumm" or "Silly Image Editor", then this would be more comparable.
I hear that objection and it's a decent one, but that one just isn't as well known. Even as an American, I'm not thrilled that "offensive in America" matters more, but it does.
I have the impression that many of the people who know ‘gimp’ as a slur only do because some of the others feel a need to bring it up every single time GIMP is mentioned anywhere ever.
Respectfully, that's kind of a ridiculous "impression," easily refuted by many of us who have wanted to recommend GIMP to people.
And again, it's called "reading the room." Even if you don't care about it being "offensive" or a "slur," names still matter. Like, if the word "poop" was in the name of some otherwise good software.
> Respectfully, that's kind of a ridiculous "impression," easily refuted by many of us who have wanted to recommend GIMP to people.
Is it though? Almost every time the topic is discussed, I see someone in the comments only then learning that the word is also known by some as a slur.
> Like, if the word "poop" was in the name of some otherwise good software.
Except that ‘poop’ is a common word with a single common meaning. ‘Gimp’ is not a common word and has several different meanings, one of them a slur, another kinky, and others probably innocuous (if even more uncommon). Many people (even among native English speakers, though let’s not forget about the rest of the world) only know the word as the name of the program. The two don’t really compare.
I think "Do people commonly understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word?" is the wrong question.
The right question is, "Did _enough_ people understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word to harm its adoption?" and the answer is probably yes.
The people complaining about GIMP's name are the ones who love and use it, who have seen the name cause problems. There's a modicum of grief for the counterfactual (of how much better GIMP might be if it didn't set up artificial barriers for itself), and the frustration with people who obstinately don't see the problem.
I think both questions are good to ask. Another follow-up question would be ‘how big is the damage to adoption’, since the answer could range from ‘barely perceptible’ to ‘devastating’. An answer closer to the latter would, in my opinion, make a great reason for a name change.
I doubt if anyone’s mind was changed about adopting GIMP.
People who never hear about GIMP in the first place are never going to use it.
Someone asks, "How did you make that?" and your answer is PhotoShop and not GIMP. That's one less person who might use GIMP, and one less person who might introduce GIMP to other people, and so forth.
Who takes people seriously who judge something by its name instead if it’s functions?
"Names don't matter" is obviously a silly stance. Pre-emptively dismissing people who disagree as "not serious" when you're taking a stance like this does not make an argument in favor of your stance.
Names are something that clearly matter to people, and that impacts anyone working with people.
People who work for the judgers, when the judgers pay their salary
The entirety of the capitalist business world, unfortunately.
Those who use Slack and Twitter and now X?
If GIMP would create profit they could call it dogshit and the same people would visit the Shit-Con for business news
This is so painfully wrong it hurts; many a company has lived and/or died PURELY on name.
Examples?