Get Involved

GIMP is Free Software, mostly licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) license, and historically part of the GNU Project.

In the free software world, there is generally no distinction between users and developers. As in a friendly neighborhood, everybody pitches in to help their neighbors. Please consider the time you give in assistance to others as payment.

Ways in which you can help:

Fix bugs or program new features
Our Developer Website is where you want to start learning about being a code contributor.
Report bugs (errors in the program)
As any application, GIMP is not bug-free, so reporting bugs that you encounter is very important to the development.
Test existing features and provide feedback
If you think a feature can be improved somehow, you can discuss the improvements on the forums and create enhancement requests (the same way you report bugs).
Write or improve the documentation
The Documentation websites tells you all about contributing.
Translate GIMP or documentation to your own language
Contact the respective translation team for your language. The Translation Project page of GNOME is also of interest.
Write tutorials on this website
We have a procedure for writing tutorials too!
Improve this website
Creating websites that contain useful information is very important. It is just as important as doing bug reports. A website contains a lot of information that are needed for the development to move on and it also contains information that will help the public to understand what the application is all about. We explain how to help us in a dedicated tutorial.
Make artwork for GIMP
After all, GIMP is for artists, designers, photographers and other creators. So if you want to contribute your art under a Libre license, feel free to reach out.
Let people know you used GIMP for your artwork
On your website, social networks or whatnot!
Give away copies of GIMP
This is Free Software, it is made to be shared, just like knowledge and know-how. Give GIMP to your neighbors, your friend, your family, everyone!
Help others to learn GIMP
Write books about GIMP, teach it in university, in websites, video tutorial, local community workshops, everywhere! GIMP is free to use and will never try to tamper with your work.
Help new GIMP users in online forums
See the Discuss page for a list of official discussion venues for GIMP. Helping in non-official forums, for instance in your native language is also great!
etc.
As you can see, anyone can help. This is what a community is about.

Once you’ve figured out what to do, be bold and get to work!

GIMP’s community is a friendly one, but it probably is still worth saying this: Try not to take critiques personally. We all just want GIMP to be the best that it can be. Once approved, your edits will be merged into the code base, making you an official GIMP contributor. And if you keep up the good work, not only will this process get easier with practice, your administrative privileges in GIMP development will also increase too.

Development Status

The team is currently busy working on v3.0. This will be a port of GIMP to GTK+3, much newer and better supported version of the user interface toolkit.

A huge part of GIMP’s source code is related to the user interface, so this port is a major undertaking, especially since we shall break API and refactor numerous parts of the program.

We still need to port more plugins to become GEGL operations. If you are willing to help with that, please refer to the Porting filters to GEGL page to see what you could work on.

To get a better understanding of where the project is heading to, which features are planned etc., please visit the Roadmap page.