20 Years of GIMP (gimp.org)

jones_supa writes: Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.

Comments

Re:Fork

[exomondo]

Yeah, problem is there's just too many people that like it, so even though it is possible to fork very few distros would switch to it.

Why does an image editing program have to be bundled with the operating system? If the fork is better then people will use it, if people aren't even willing to install it separately then obviously it isn't very good.

Re:Port Paint.net to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Pinta:

Pinta is a free, open source drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. Its goal is to provide users with a simple yet powerful way to draw and manipulate images on Linux, Mac, Windows, and *BSD.

Re:Sadly..

[ChrisMaple]

You don't even need to patch. Shortcuts are configurable.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

GEGL is mostly complete. The work that's happening today is to port all of Gimp to make use of GEGL which is the goal of Gimp 2.10. Gimp 2.10 has been in development for a few years now should it should be due for release within a couple of years.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[binarstu]

When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused

This complaint has cropped up several times on this thread already. That is somewhat incredible, because GIMP has supported a single-window interface for years. Select "Single-Window Mode" from the "Windows" menu, and the "so many windows" will become one window.

Re:Fork

[mrchaotica]

You'd think that a 2d image editor should be a fairly simple job, something handled mostly by standard libraries now.

Isn't that what they're trying to do? Last I heard, they were working on implementing a clean library, GEGL and then they were going to rewrite GIMP to use it.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.

No. You're flat-out wrong there. A lot of profesional software, for example CAD does not work like that. Save is native format only and NEVER loses information. Information losing always lives in "export". I just fired my copy of Eagle-CAD up and yes, it's as I claim.

File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.

Define: proper. If you opened it in GIMP, the proper format is XCF since that's the only format you can save without loss. Exporting to another format like LJPEG requires compositing into a single layer.

It's a subtle trade-off between maybe having the "right" file format by default and maybe losing information. There's no one right answer, and it's easy to get used to File->Export.

Re:Sadly..

[Lord Bitman]

Really, in most software, "save" and "export" functionality has been merged. Because "whether or not the format is the preferred format of the program" isn't even an implementation detail. It's a developer preference. It has absolutely no place in the main tool. Having one list of formats for "save" and a different list of formats for "export" is beyond insane. Worse than old-Photoshop's "you can't save in this format, because you are using features X, Y, and Z" (instead of just launching a conversion process) - Gimp doesn't give you the option *whether or not* you're using incompatible features.