In the free software world, there is generally no distinction between users and
developers. As in a friendly neighbourhood, everybody pitches in to help their
neighbors. Please consider the time you give in assistance to others as payment.
GIMP is not bug-free nor is any other application so reporting bugs
that you encounter is very important to the development, it helps the developers
to make GIMP more stable. You don’t have to be a developer or a everyday user
to report bugs.
Test existing features and provide feedback
If you think a feature can be improved somehow, you can discuss the
improvements on the gimp-gui mailing list and
create enhancement requests (the same way you report bugs).
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 neighbours, 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!
The GIMP 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.
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.
