The UI needs a global overhaul since the day one and still nobody talks about it
I can do loads of stuff despite GIMP’s efforts to stop me.
I’ve been using Photo Gimp plugin with it for years. Otherwise the interface would be an absolute mess.
Can you turn it on and off easily? I know my way around photoshop but still want to learn vanilla gimp.
No it’s not just an on/off toggle. You’d have to uninstall the plugin. Install/Uninstall instructions are on the repo page. https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
I’ve never understood the purpose of PhotoGimp. I get why it exists. But it doesn’t do anything magical that GIMP isn’t already designed to let you do in the first place…which is move around, open, close and organize any window or dock into any place you want.
Anyone who has used GIMP for more than a few days has long since organized it to their own personal workflow; even some that look like photoshop.
The same goes for keyboard shortcuts. You can change literally everything about how GIMP looks anytime you want. So why lock yourself into some script that makes it look like a clone of some corporate crap, and worse…donate to the guy who designed said script as though he made something significant that no one else could achieve.
It’s very existence is a lie. Users aren’t locked into anything and he didn’t do some magic to change that. It’s literally how GIMP is designed to be customized.
Play with it. Have fun with it. That’s the entire point.
It’s basically just a drop in configuration to make it look and feel more like the Photoshop interface. Can you accomplish the same with tinkering? Sure. Do I want the spend all day trying to make it look pretty when I need to actually be working in the software? Hell no. Just drop in the plugin and get to work. It has it’s place. It would be less necessary if GIMP default layout didn’t suck right out of the box.
I give exactly zero fucks about tinkering with my image editing software, I just want to edit images without UX which invariably leaves me foaming with volcanic rage inside of 90 seconds.
@BlackLaZoR @Vosh I think lots of people talk about it. :)
We have a dedicated UX site for people share to feedback on that very topic, which we try to implement as we can: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work/_items
The hope is that over time, designers will get more comfortable and work on larger design challenges (like how new code contributors start small and hopefully grow to develop more complex features)
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_items
I’ve been using GIMP for over a decade. It’s slowly starting to become one of the leading sources of frustration in my computing life. The more I learn about it the less it makes any sense.
Not trying to be negative here. Just saying that a modernization is much needed and I’m really excited for this.
I used to work in schools IT and I managed to get a lot of FOSS tools into regular use amongst both staff and students; Audacity, Libre Office, Firefox, even Debian in a few IT labs… but the one that never stuck was GIMP because no teacher is going to tell their class they’ll be using GIMP today.
I know this is a tired point and will probably never be fixed, but that name causes more problems than anything else.
I only learned about this “negative connotation” from people yelling about how GIMP name is bad.
monkey paw curls, we keep it gimp but pronounce it gimp
Yep, always felt the same way. Can’t be seriously suggested in a professional environment simply because of its name. Whole project been shooting itself in the foot with a machine gun since day 1.
There’s a meme floating about somewhere that goes:
Windows Tool: Producix Pro for Business 2024
MacOS Tool: Sweesh
Linux Tool: klitoris
and this kinda feels like that.
proffessors could say “we’ll be using Gnu Image processing” or “Gnu Imp” if they wanted to get lame about it. The real big knoggin move is to just call it GIMP and silently dare your students to act like children
Tell me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers without telling me you’ve never tried to control a class of teenagers.
Never a class bigger than 12. But i did it at Scout camp and we were using knives and rope and fire so maybe they were more willing to be cool because i was visibly armed and dangerous
This is always interesting to hear because as someone who went school in a non English speaking country, GIMP was obviously never an issue. In most of the world the name isn’t an issue.
I only learned about that alternative meaning years later.
But for millions of people it is… the fact that it isn’t for some cultures does not negate the influence for those where it is. Companies like Apple will skip numbers and names if it’s a problem in one place (like say China) because they realize more adoption is useful. Old Gimp heads though just whine about America or some shit and wonder why nobody fucking uses it after 30 years.
Everything about this project is always saying they’re looking for input and design ideas but their old-ass users shoot down every person that has anything to say, many of whom have ideas from working as actual professionals for those same thirty years.
Could you eli5 why gimp doesn’t work as a name, i genuenly don’t know…
It’s a derogatory term as well as a BDSM term.
Is it derogatory?
Definitely thought it was a humiliation thing
Some consider it an ableist term
Related to that, Jacob Boerema has implemented PSD Descriptor import support. Most of our current PSD support has been based on the the public Adobe specification. This document was last updated in 2019 however, and modern PSDs use a relatively undocumented text format called Descriptors to store many features.
The battle tested strategy of only providing old standards to others, like MS does.
Don’t use PSDs? I know people will say, “it’s not as simple as that, they’re industry standard”, but if you say you’ll only accept professional work in an open format, and you’re the client, you have the control to change things.
Krita for the win if you just need the drawing part. Left Gimp long time ago for Krita and never looked back.
they better add a fucking draw circle tool istg
@janus2 @Vosh You’ll be happy to know it’s in the cards. Proof of Concept now that we have vector layers: https://fosstodon.org/@CmykStudent/116455148076446506
I haven’t touched it lately since a new contributor was interested in implementing it, but one way or the other I hope to get it into 3.4.
it exists lol, just make a circle selection and then “stroke selection”
It is okay to say that GIMP can technically do this, and also that it needs a straight up circle tool. Not having a live preview of what you are doing is not good UX in this situation.
“GIMP can technically do this” should be its tagline.
That’s how I felt when I discovered non-destructive layer transformations are (technically) possible
Or, hear me out, a tool that draws a circle.
It would be cool if GIMP’s new format could remember the undo history. I sometimes save edited images as XCF projects so I can quickly make a tweak and re-export it if I need to, but if you do something like crop, color grade, etc., and then save it, you can’t undo that later when you reopen the project file because the original, unmodified image data has been lost. You can work around this somewhat by saving unmodified versions of something to its own disabled/invisible layer, but it would make things easier if there was some kind of undo history preservation so you could open a project and sift thru the history of operations performed on the image.
Use Krita instead. It has a big tiddy anime waifu right on the splash screen.
Different project scope tho.
Krita does not support random niche format like GIMP.
Yes but the UI is 💯 easier to use.
The number 1 problem with GIMP is poor UI in my experience.
Easier interface AND anime aesthetics? Sign me up.
no it isnt. we keep hearing this and no, they never have a massive upgrade. that project doesnt do massive. that’s not how it’s ever be run. its stable, predictable, sane, but ugly things we have all hated forever will never be massively revamped in a single update.
Are they going to upgrade the name as well?
This comes up every time GIMP is mentioned. To be honest, outside US and UK (and few others) for the rest of the world the word GIMP has no negative meaning (no meaning at all). So, yeah, maybe who cares about the name? Well, change it if it’s really a problem. But, is it really a problem?
Fair point is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) doesn’t sound as a reasonable acronym. I would maybe find a better acronym, but changing the name itself feels like changing the name of the town of Bra in Italy or the town of Fuck in Austria, or why not, even the town of Love in Sweden… Good luck if we need to only find and use names that do not offend anybody in any language of the world.
Krita, the main FOSS competitor to GIMP, feels a much worse sounding name to me. By the way, i read GIMP with a soft G (like a j) not even as English speakers do pronounce it.
Honestly I think some people just want to be offended. “Oh I can’t use this in class because of the name” is complete nonsense. If the faculty are going to immediately assume you’re doing weird sex things with the kids then you’ve got bigger communication problems.
gimp /gĭmp/
noun
A narrow flat braid or rounded cord of fabric used for trimming.
A limp or a limping gait.
A person who limps.I suppose the association with limping is a bit unfortunate. Although GIMP is an acronym.
The fact that a particular sub-culture has its own slang meaning for the word is irrelevant.
No it’s not. It’s very relevant - it’s the reason I’ve never recommended the software to anyone outside of close friends.
Why should they change the name just for the vanity of Americans who have a dual meaning for the word, and make it difficult for the whole rest of the world to find tutorials and documentation going back decades?
It’s not just awkward for Americans, but for the entire English speaking world - at least 470 million people. How can anyone seriously recommend a business use a program called GIMP? It is a massive hurdle to adoption in the corporate world. They should change the name, or at least create a business-oriented alias.
So in order to make it less awkward for ~500M people, we should make it more awkward for the rest of the 7.8B people.
English is diverse language and each regional English have their own offensive world that have different meaning in different English speaking area.
Maybe you should meet more Indian English speaker and Singaporean English speaker. Heck, Australian English invent various offensive word.
Yes but we don’t use them in professional contexts.
There is no Dickheadsoft, no Drongo Ware. We haven’t call any software C.U.N.T.
GIMP means the same thing here and it’s just as unprofessional.
My point is that due to British colonialization, English is now a diverse language that have diverse new word and regional meaning.
GIMP in English Asia doesn’t have bad connotation. Not in Singaporean English, not in Indian English.
Making one standard of English is just reeks language colonialism.
No it’s just regular PR.
We avoid 4 in products due to negative connotations in Asia, even though it means nothing here.
I’m in the UK. I use it as my primary image editor on my work computers. Should we be avoiding using LaTeX too because in a different context it’s a kink thing?
It just seems such a weird thing to be prudish about in this day and age. English words are regularly contextual and in a business environment why would one go to the NSFW context as default?
GYMP? 💪✨🤭
Why? It describes succinctly what the app does.
That’s a US defaultism issue
It was created in the US and named in specific reference to the offensive meaning of the word, so I would say that makes it pretty relevant.
Why is a sexual term automatically offensive?
Being sexual doesn’t automatically make it offensive, it just makes it unprofessional. As software that is seeking widespread adoption, its acceptance in professional environments matters. I could make a program called Skrotum if I thought it was funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised when people are hesitant to recommend it to others because of the name I chose.
What makes it offensive is that it’s a slur for handicapped people. That’s the origin of the BDSM term and the use that was popularized by the character in Pulp Fiction that was specifically referenced by the creators of GIMP.
Because he lives in a fucked up puritan place.
Leaving this here for Photoshop converts
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
I use Affinity full time at the moment, but if they ever go paid, I’m running straight to GIMP.
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I love GIMP and no amount of tedious naysaying will ever change my mind
I did a few tutorials years ago. I realized that the way it did things was different from Photoshop and, in some ways, better. I could appreciate some of the design choices.
The problem is that most people learn PS first and then don’t learn Gimp at all, and then when they find out Gimp doesn’t work like Photoshop, they decide that it sucks.
I’ve always wanted to see gimp on the same level of blender.
Blender is astounding at how much it can do, but boy does it feel like a project that suffered major scope creep. There seems to be years worth of “but what if it could also do this?” attached to it. As a novice Blender user I still find the UI incredibly difficult to work with.
I’m hundreds of hours in and I still sometimes accidentally hit the wrong hotkey and spend 39 minutes figuring out why edit mode doesn’t edit anymore, or why I can’t weight paint in weight mode.
Feature discovery has become more organic and less “unfuck blender” though, so that’s nice.
The grass is uh, slightly less brown on the other side I guess?
Phenomenal program though.
I’ve recently tried using GIMP again and, as a past detractor, I’ve gotta say it’s improved significantly.
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Not to down on them too much but this comment is kind of funny in the context of a 30 year old program.
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To be fair, Photoshop peaked about 10 years ago and has been steadily getting worse. It’s only a matter of time before they’re neck and neck.
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Honestly so much better when they moved away from the “everything is a floating window” interface. I can find stuff now.
GIMP is shaping up to be (and actually already is IMO) the best editor out there for nondestructive work.
Does the UX still suck though?
Nope. You just made the mistake of learning something else first and expecting other tools to match it
Expecting it to be the exact same and working in an expected way are different. Blender used to select with RMB instead of LMB like every other program in existence, is it really the users fault for finding that stupid?
Following expectations and having a “smooth” workflow is something to aim for unless the standard is really bad. No need to fix what ain’t broken
I stopped using GIMP for Krita, but it looks like GIMP’s nondestructive has come a long way.
