No. We are a diverse group of volunteers from around the world who work on this project in their spare time. Code-wise most of project contributions come from Europe where the current GIMP maintainers live. Our translators are an even more diverse group of contributors, since GIMP is available in more than 80 languages.
Yes, you can. GIMP is free software, it doesn’t put restrictions on the kind of work you produce with it.
GIMP is distributed under terms of General Public License v3 and later. In a nutshell, this means:
Note that once you distribute modified version of GIMP, you also must publish your changes to the source code under GPLv3+ as well.
Yes, under terms of the General Public License this is perfectly legal, provided that the seller also gave you the source code of GIMP and any modifications they introduced. Please see this page for more information.
No. Most generic image editors look like Photoshop simply because Adobe’s application was among the first image editors as we know them now, so developers tend to stick to what people know — in general terms.
What we aim to do is to create a high-end image manipulation application that is free to use and modify by everyone, ever.
Feature-wise, the proposed “high-end” status does automatically put GIMP into direct comparison against Photoshop, but we don’t think about competition much. We have too many ideas of our own to implement, and too many things to improve before the notion of competition begins to make the slightest sense.
We do, however, acknowledge the fact that people will treat GIMP as Photoshop replacement no matter what we tell them, and that’s all right with us. You own this software, it’s up to you to decide how you make use of it.
In the past, the development in the project was somewhat erratic with regards to taking usability into consideration, which is rather typical for free software projects in their early years.
Between 2006 and 2013, we worked with Peter Sikking of Man+Machine Works, a professional usability architect, who helped us shape a first project vision for GIMP, interviews professional users to better understand their workflows and demands, and wrote functional specifications for various GIMP features.
This collaboration resulted in major improvements of GIMP’s usability, in particular: the rectangular-based selection/cropping tools, the unified free/polyline selection tool, the single-window mode, the upcoming unified transformation tool etc.
While working on functional specifications, Peter researched how various features are implemented in applications with a partially matching feature set (such as Adobe Photoshop), but the final design was made to help actual users complete their tasks as fast as possible.
Since 2012, Aryeom Han (animation film director, fine arts artist and designer) started working with the GIMP team, and in particular Jehan, which resulted in many UX improvements and new features. Such enhancements include the ability to select multiple layers, the Alt-middle click feature to quick select a layer from canvas, the Alt-right click action to change brush sizes (and generally the ability to map any action to any button + modifier), a redesign of item locks, the specification of the layer effects interface we envision, and so many more features that we can’t list them all (so much that they became maintainers of GIMP).
This work with and by Aryeom was the source of the creation for our
gimp-ux
repository in 2024, dedicated to gather feedbacks, discuss about
interface, experience and write down specifications of features with
well thought rationals.
This is exactly the kind of approach to designing interfaces that we consider to be superior to merely copying others’ user interaction decisions.
Interestingly we get about as many remarks about the interface changing too much as we get remarks about it not changing enough. That makes this an even more complicated question to answer to!
On the “changing too much” side, we still have to follow evolutions of the desktop metaphor for graphical interfaces. Otherwise the technical debt would end up making the software unmaintainable and eventually disappear. For instance, we need to keep up with our GUI toolkit evolutions. We also need to adapt to changes of paradigms which various platform are introducing.
On the other hand, we do take at heart not to unnecessarily change things just for the sake of changing, and therefore confuse users who got proficient with our software through the decades. And this answers the second half of people wondering why they don’t see more dramatic visual changes across GIMP versions. This is on purpose. A lot of people are using GIMP all the time, many of them even do so for a living. We should not change things unless we have good reasons to.
Thirty years ago, when Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis first wrote what became the GNU Image Manipulation Program, they called it IMP, for Image Manipulation Program. It was then renamed to the General Image Manipulation Program, and then to the GNU Image Manipulation Program. They referenced a character from the movie “Pulp Fiction” which was trendy at the time.
After the original authors left the project, the primary maintainers and developers have mostly been people who do not have English as a first language and never considered the software name to be a word. Language and culture diversity is important. In French or German, for instance (languages of current maintainers), GIMP is only a great software for image manipulation!
Now we do understand the issue as reported to us. The main issue is our thirty years of brand recognition, which leads to two sub-issues:
As a conclusion, this simply can’t happen overnight, yet we are not opposed in principle to changing the name. In fact the GIMP team has discussed the topic and experimented solutions internally for years!
Our current development experiment is to make the program name configurable, to allow people to run GIMP under a secondary name. To be continued…
We release both updates to the current stable version and development versions.
We cut new updates of the stable version in two cases: 1) some newly introduced bug is knowingly affecting a lot of users; 2) the amount of improvements and bug fixes is large enough to justify an update — typically, a few dozens of each, but there is no rule.
We are a team of volunteers with day jobs, families, and personal interests beyond development of software. Given that, we try to avoid the situation when we cannot deliver a release, because something else at work/in family came up.
Instead we provide a feature-based roadmap that roughly outlines, in what order we will be implementing various popular requests made by users.
We tried a few times to give date estimates but it always ends up as being taken as some kind of “promises” and relayed in news outlets, finally backfiring into having people telling us we don’t keep our promises. Anyone working in software development knows that estimates are just an attempt to organize. This is why we are wary about publishing dates in announcements now.
Some developers have jobs they love and contribute in their spare time, while others actively try to make a living with Free Software development. GIMP project actively encourages personal fundraisers by trusted contributors. There are two such campaigns running at the moment. You can learn more about them on the Donate page.
If you are willing to launch a campaign and develop some features for GIMP, talk to us about changes you are about to propose. We’ll help you to flesh out your idea and promote it to a larger community.
Apps for mobile devices imply a different approach to designing interfaces. Since most of GIMP’s source code is related to the user interface one way or another, it means that we would have to design and then develop a whole new application. Given the current manpower, we’d rather focus on delivering a great image manipulation program for desktop users.
However, this has been a topic of interest to several core developers across the years. We might release some day a GIMP-branded image manipulation program for Android. Though no promises!
As for iOS, please note that GIMP is licensed under GNU GPL v3+ which conflicts with Apple’s Terms of Service. For a full story, please read this article by Richard Gaywood.
GIMP features plug-ins for using darktable and RawTherapee to process raw images, as well as a preference for a default raw processing plug-in.
Yes, better support for CMYK has been on our roadmap for a long time. One of the ideas, how we want to make this work, was introduced by user interaction architect Peter Sikking at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 and later — in his two-part article in his company’s blog: 1, 2. Please take some time to read up on that.
We needed to finalize transition to the new image processing engine, GEGL, before attempting to introduce features like CMYK support. Now that it is complete, initial work on CMYK support has been done in the babl and GEGL libraries that GIMP relies on. This is partially funded by the GIMP community, you can join in, too.
More work happened in the GIMP 2.99.12 development iteration, as a GSoC project. This allowed or improved importing and exporting CMYK images in various file formats (converted to and from RGB as storage format) and expose CMYK pixel information within GIMP (e.g. when color picking) within the context of a soft-proof color profile.
As for making CMYK a core image format (such as RGB, Grayscale or indexed), we have no timeline on this but we also wish it to be possible some day. Also, please note that we are not planning advanced features such as GCR support for now. This will most likely require a new dedicated developer in the team.
Should a new developer join the team to specifically work on CMYK-related features, we will do our best to help him/her to complete this project and get it to our users as soon as possible.
In the Rectangular or Elliptical selection tool, click in one corner of your square or circle, then press Shift while dragging toward the other corner. Or enable the checkbox for Fixed: Aspect Ratio in tool options and make sure the aspect ratio is set to 1:1 before starting your square or circular selection.
Once you have a selection, Edit->Stroke Selection... will draw a line the
shape of the selection you just made.
For curved selections, like circles, stroking with the Paintbrush paint tool
will usually give a smoother looking line. You can get an even smoother line
by converting the selection to a path (Select->To Path), then using
Edit->Stroke Path... instead of Stroke Selection...
As a general rule though, if you mostly need to work with shapes, maybe GIMP is not the most adapted tool. This is typically a usage for vector applications. We recommend for instance Inkscape which is a great Free Software for vector imagery.
We are planning to eventually have a shape tool, but having vector layers (which is also planned) will have to be the first step.
We only just ported GIMP to GTK+3. Please give us some time to breathe before starting to pressure us into yet another toolkit port.
Note also that even though following GTK evolution is obviously planned, this is not necessarily a priority for us or our users. Most people doing advanced usage of GIMP don’t care about the toolkit and even have no idea what GTK is. They want to work on image manipulation, and few of the related features are on the GTK side.
Still, it will come someday, and the roadmap might be a good place to look at for reference.
We realize that some changes are disruptive to some groups of users, especially those who got used to GIMP as an image editor for doing quick fixes to lossy files such as JPEG, PNG etc. (i.e. files that cannot store layers, masks, custom channels, paths).
However, adding a switch for every change we make adds numerous levels of complexity that we’d rather avoid. Additionally, it would lead to dramatically changing the way we mean GIMP to work. Hence we respectfully disagree to make extra behaviour switches.
Great! Please check the developer website for introduction on GIMP development and talk to us on IRC.
Absolutely! Our community includes artists, designers, translators, documenters, writers, webmasters and much more! Please check the Get Involved pages for ways you can help. Here are some of the ways you can help us: