GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Program

GIMP version 2.10
Original author(s)	Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis
Developer(s)	GIMP Development Team
Initial release	2 June 1998; 26 years ago (1998-06-02)
Stable release	2.10.38[1]  / 5 May 2024
Preview release	2.99.18[2]  / 21 February 2024
Repository	gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
Written in	C, C++, Python, Scheme
Operating system	Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AmigaOS 4
Available in	82 languages[3]
List of languages Amharic, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Bulgarian, Burmese, Canadian English, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Kannada, Kashubian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Cyrillic script), Serbian (Latin script), Sinhala, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Valencian, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yiddish
Type	Raster graphics editor
License	GPL-3.0-or-later
Website	www.gimp.org

GNU Image Manipulation Program, commonly known by its acronym GIMP (/ɡɪmp/ GHIMP), is a free and open-source raster graphics editor^[4] used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. It is extensible by means of plugins, and scriptable. It is not designed to be used for drawing, though some artists and creators have used it in this way.^[5]

GIMP is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.^[6]

History[edit]

In 1995, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP—originally named General Image Manipulation Program—as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility.^[7] The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to -IMP as a reference to "the gimp" in the scene from the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.^[8]

1996 was the initial public release of GIMP (0.54).^[9][10] The editor was quickly adopted and a community of contributors formed. The community began developing tutorials and artwork and sharing better work-flows and techniques.^[11]

In the following year, Kimball and Mattis met with Richard Stallman of the GNU Project while he visited UC Berkeley and asked if they could change General in the application's name to GNU (the name of the operating system created by Stallman), and Stallman approved.^[12] The application subsequently formed part of the GNU software collection.^[13]

The first release supported Unix systems, such as Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX.^[7][14] Since then, GIMP has been ported to other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows (1997, GIMP 1.1)^[14] and macOS.

A GUI toolkit called GTK (at the time known as the GIMP ToolKit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. The development of the GIMP ToolKit has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used. Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60.^[10][15]

In recent versions (since the GIMP 2.9 build), the removal of the Lanczos image scaling algorithm, which had been used by GIMP and other image editing programs for many years, in favor of pushing forward the new NoHalo and LoHalo algorithms developed by Nicolas Robidoux, caused some controversy among GIMP users, with some users standing by the change but others expressing their dissatisfaction about it, due to mixed quality results in some image scaling scenarios, leading some users to keep using the older 2.8 version of GIMP simply because it's the last build with Lanczos support, and a few users giving up on using the application altogether as a result. To this day, several users hope to see a future version of GIMP with the Lanczos algorithm added back as an option for image resampling.^[16][17][18]

Mascot[edit]

GIMP's mascot is called Wilber and was created in GIMP by Tuomas Kuosmanen, known as tigert, on 25 September 1997. Wilber received additional accessories from other GIMP developers, which can be found in the Wilber Construction Kit, included in the GIMP source code as /docs/Wilber_Construction_Kit.xcf.gz.^[19]

Development[edit]

GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers as a free and open source software project associated with both the GNU and GNOME projects. Development takes place in a public git source code repository,^[20] on public mailing lists and in public chat channels on the GIMPNET IRC network.^[21]

New features are held in public separate source code branches and merged into the main (or development) branch when the GIMP team is sure they won't damage existing functions.^[20] Sometimes this means that features that appear complete do not get merged or take months or years before they become available in GIMP.

GIMP itself is released as source code. After a source code release, installers and packages are made for different operating systems by parties who might not be in contact with the maintainers of GIMP.

The version number used in GIMP is expressed in a major-minor-micro format, with each number carrying a specific meaning: the first (major) number is incremented only for major developments (and is currently 2). The second (minor) number is incremented with each release of new features, with odd numbers reserved for in-progress development versions and even numbers assigned to stable releases; the third (micro) number is incremented before and after each release (resulting in even numbers for releases, and odd numbers for development snapshots) with any bug fixes subsequently applied and released for a stable version.

Previously, GIMP applied for several positions in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).^[22][23] From 2006 to 2009 there have been nine GSoC projects that have been listed as successful,^[22] although not all successful projects have been merged into GIMP immediately. The healing brush and perspective clone tools and Ruby bindings were created as part of the 2006 GSoC and can be used in version 2.8.0 of GIMP, although there were three other projects that were completed and are later available in a stable version of GIMP; those projects being Vector Layers (end 2008 in 2.8 and master),^[24] and a JPEG 2000 plug-in (mid 2009 in 2.8 and master).^[25] Several of the GSoC projects were completed in 2008, but have been merged into a stable GIMP release later in 2009 to 2014 for Version 2.8.xx and 2.10.x. Some of them needed some more code work for the master tree.

Second public Development 2.9-Version was 2.9.4 with many deep improvements after initial Public Version 2.9.2.^[26][27] Third Public 2.9-Development version is Version 2.9.6.^[28] One of the new features is removing the 4 GB size limit of XCF file.^[29][30] Increase of possible threads to 64 is also an important point for modern parallel execution in actual AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon processors. Version 2.9.8 included many bug fixes and improvements in gradients and clips.^[31] Improvements in performance and optimization beyond bug hunting were the development targets for 2.10.0.^[32] MacOS Beta is available with Version 2.10.4.^[33]

The next stable version in the roadmap is 3.0 with a GTK3 port.^[34] 2.99-Series is the development Series to 3.0. Jehan Pages, the lead developer and maintainer of GIMP, stated that GIMP 3.0's release is tentative for May 2024 and plans to announce the release at the next Libre Graphics Meeting conference.^[35]

GIMP developers meet during the annual Libre Graphics Meeting.^[36] Interaction designers from OpenUsability have also contributed to GIMP.^[37]

Versions[edit]

GIMP 0.x[edit]

GIMP 1.x[edit]

GIMP 2.x[edit]