I know many people have strong feelings about GIMP, and I just have to say that I love it. I use it for basic photo editing stuff—I’m not an artist—and it has always done what I needed it to do.
I gave up on comparing it to Photoshop over a decade ago, and by simply accepting it as its own thing (learning how it works and not grumbling about how this/that isn’t how Photoshop does it), it’s really not that difficult to learn. Just like vi (or photoshop) it’s a powerful tool and you need to spend some time to gain competence with it.
Gimp is in a tough spot, and it's easy to understand - it's an open source project that has bounced around for decades without strong leadership or corporate investment to pull it forward (cf. Blender).
In that time they haven't built non-destructive layers, they haven't improved the UI, and they've kept that stupid kink/ableist name.
Image editors in the near future will be 100% AI-first. Gimp is not going to make it.
> Image editors in the near future will be 100% AI-first. Gimp is not going to make it.
30 years ago AI was also a big hype. As you can see, after 30 years AI is again the big hype. I presume that in 30 years (if we live that long) we will see again such statements that AI will solve everything.
I don't get why HN feels this way about AI. We're clearly onto something. Scratching the surface. The present day research hasn't even been productized - there's so much the current level of AI can and will improve. And yet research marches forward at blinding pace.
We are going to end up with Clippy 2.0. Microsoft is going to want it to always nudge towards Microsoft services.
> Hey, it looks like you are trying to build a webservice. Would you like to switch to C# or Typescript?
I have seen this story 100 times before. We have barely scraped VR, but Facebook is bought up the leader and now we have a terrible experience with attempts to lock in all the time. We had barely scraped 3D, but Hollywood decided that it would be best if it were presented as Minions with yo-yos rather than subtle ways of increasing immersion.
We could have had really awesome phones that brought about social changes. Or we could have Apple trying to lock everyone into a chat silo and Google trying to produce an iPhone and Microsoft destroying the only innovative phone manufacturer.
I'm cynical because the folks investing in these things don't have our interests, they want to make a quick buck so they can fuck off to Mars.
Pareto's principle is alive and well, the first 20% of developing a technology is the easiest and most productive, but the actual goal is deep in the weeds of the non-trivial 80% of the work that must be done.
Thanks to capitalism, the work will stall alongside the profits. We'll get 30-50% of the way there, and hit the wall, that being that if we want general purpose AI we will have to pay researchers and developers more and more money for more and more diminishing returns.
Eventually we will hit the point where even though we are 80% of the way there, the bean counters won't justify the expense. "It's good enough, just stop here" they'll say, and then all of the research will be shelved for 5-7 years, then open sourced, and then muddled with for 10 years or so and then the cycle will repeat itself all over again until the right genius with the right background in the right time and right location finally codes the right bit of code or uncovers a new branch that we've overlooked and this all blows up again.
I didn’t even know that Gimp had a slang definition until this thread.
Do you genuinely think this change would help the project? I don’t see how it does anything other than confuse potential users and cause a lot of discussion about something that doesn’t actually improve the functionality itself.
I’m certain renaming GIMP would make a tremendous difference. The name is perceived as offensive & that makes it impossible for people to take seriously, especially in a corporate setting. Edit: As someone who has tried to get people using it because it’s such great software.
I used it in my high-school multimedia class instead of Photoshop and my (female) teacher never bat an eyelid. I can't imagine many workplaces that would be more prudish than a Catholic school? The biggest obstacle I find is that people are used to Photoshop, and some tools are quite tricky to use (the alignment tool).
ROTFL. Never heard about this in 20 years.
Doing an extended search shows that "gimp" is a kind of latex costume. There are worse things for kids than a latex costume. For example violence.
> / (ɡɪmp) / noun. US and Canadian offensive, slang a physically disabled person, esp one who is lame. slang a sexual fetishist who likes to be dominated and who dresses in a leather or rubber body suit with mask, zips, and chains.
There was a fork called Glimpse - it failed hard. Just name is not enough for a project to prosper - surprisingly, you need also actual developers to code.
I could see it's name as an impedance toward adoption in a corporate environment. The name "GIMP" certainly doesn't inspire confidence in someone who's never heard of it before. GLIMPSE, a fork of GIMP, certainly has a better name.
FWIW, "git" doesn't have an insulting meaning to most people in the US. "Git" can mean "go" in some US dialects. I would guess that the average person here has no idea that "git" has any kind of negative connotation.
On the other hand, in the US, "gimp" is always either an insult, a derogatory verb, or the open source project.
Cinepaint was never general fork of Gimp and was never meant as a competitor or alternative. It was a fork focusing on solving some very domain specific problems that Gimp wasn't focusing on. Most of those features have since been folded back into Gimp.
I see a bunch of mentions of non-destructive layer effects. Non-destructive editing is a killer feature of Photoshop which GIMP has desperately needed for years. I hope they’re finally able to pull it off because it makes editing so much easier.
When it comes to simple image manipulation and transforms (scaling, colour reduction, cropping) I usually use the Image Magick CLI suite as there'll be more than one picture to process.
Krita can also be installed straight from the debian repos, if you run debian. (I imagine other distros have it too!)
I like it a lot, it has a pretty easy to use interface. Only grumble is there's no print dialogue, you have to save/export your image and then print from somewhere else, which is a pretty minor inconvenience.
Switching from GTK2 to GTK3 and online extensions management (npm for Gimp plugins) are what's most exciting to me (even though we've already moved onto GTK4...)
With a nod to Jeff Atwood, I have a problem to report in the data's very first bullet point
> ‧ 1 stable releases (GIMP 2.10.32)
Anyway, note that there is prose below the bullet point statistics. I almost missed that there was more to this post than a git summary (should have paid more attention to the table of contents). Particularly the future plans, near the bottom, I felt like finally gave some insight into what is actually going on for me, an out-of-the-loop GIMP user: https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/01/29/2022-annual-report/#pla...
Seems like they have a lot going on, lots of loose threads, but not enough manpower to guide and manage incoming contributions while also working on more necessary improvements first for earlier releases.
> New XCF format [Discussed] An archive-based format should allow us more easily to load data on-use, therefore allowing much bigger project files (ex.: page and animation)
I'll offer a positive instead of a negative. I think GIMP is great editor. It's my goto editor for simple photo/image edits that go into presentations. I am glad it exists. Some of us don't need Photoshop.
I remember GIMP used to be the poster boy for the open-source alternative to Photoshop.
But these days, I'm hearing more and more Krita, which is another popular open-source and free photo editor. Curious how GIMP holds up these days against Krita (and possible other alternatives?)
Photopea is not open source, I don't think it's a real competitor to GIMP or Krita if it can be killed by one person without any hope of outsiders maintaining it.
No. And I say this as a heavy user of darktable. Darktable/Lightroom is in a separate category altogether - focusing on workflow - as well as RAW capabilities.
I do most of my processing in Darktable, but when I need to do serious editing for a given picture, I have to drop into GIMP.
Glimpse was the attempted creation of a fork with a new name. They made a single release 2.5 years ago and later disbanded. The project officially shut down nearly 2 years ago.
Look. I teach in a university and the best part of my job is onboarding people to free and open source software; really trying to open more people up to getting involved and helping and using it etc.
I am all but certain that the childish insistence on such a borderline ridiculous name is the primary reason it's never been seen as a serious competitor to Photoshop despite being so technically.
Throwing internet temper tantrums about other people's software and demanding someone else needs to grow up is pretty rich. You're wasting a perfectly good teachable moment whereby students can learn that not everyone is beholden to Victorian standards of grimdark prudish joylessness.
I have also taught in several universities; not once has anyone even questioned the name GIMP, because I never made a big deal about it, and so there was no big deal. Your behavior shapes theirs; lean into that.
I genuinely have to wonder what point you think there is to making these sort of comments? As the report clearly shows, there are actually very few people working on GIMP; just a handful of people working in their spare time.
Is it less powerful than Photoshop? Undoubtedly, but given the development resources that's hardly surprising.
Is everyone working in their spare time on some open source tool that's not equal to $commercial_tool a "joke"? Are they all worthy of your contemptuous attitude? Should they all have snide dismissive remarks directed at them?
What are you hoping to achieve with this sort of comment?
I gave up on comparing it to Photoshop over a decade ago, and by simply accepting it as its own thing (learning how it works and not grumbling about how this/that isn’t how Photoshop does it), it’s really not that difficult to learn. Just like vi (or photoshop) it’s a powerful tool and you need to spend some time to gain competence with it.