We are happy to announce the third micro-release GIMP 3.0.6. During our development of GIMP 3.2 we’ve found and fixed a number of bugs and regressions. We have backported many of those bugfixes to this stable release, so you don’t have to wait for the upcoming 3.2 release candidate to receive them!

Release Highlights¶

Micro releases like 3.0.6 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions. Many of these have already been announced in our 3.1.2 and 3.1.4 news posts. However, we wanted to highlight some of the most commonly reported issues so that you are aware of the fixes.

Improve usability of sliders¶

To quote from our 3.1.4 news post:

As part of the port to GTK3, the default cursors were updated. This change led to some users experiencing the dreaded “Hand” cursor when hovering over a number slider widget. Unfortunately, the arrow cursor from GIMP 2.10 is not included on all platforms so we had to devise an alternate method. Denis Rangelov and Michal Vašut helped us find an initial solution while we continue to work on the design. We hope the current solution will make it easier for you to see where you’re clicking!

Workaround for Windows language-specific crashes¶

Since GIMP 3.0, we have received reports from some users that GIMP crashed for them upon opening or exporting files. We were unable to replicate the problem, until developers like Jacob Boerema and Bruno Lopes noticed a pattern - the affected users all had specific system languages like Turkish or Norwegian Bokmål. They traced the bug to our metadata library, Exiv2.

With the help of an Exiv2 maintainer Kevin Backhouse, we eventually found that the problem was caused by a bug in LLVM’s libc++, further made worse by a bug in Windows UCRT code! We have filed a report with Microsoft while Luca Bacci has contributed a patch to LLVM project, not merged yet. While waiting for the issues to be resolved at the source, Bruno has added a temporary patch to our Exiv2 build proposed by Kevin in order to workaround the issue. If you continue to have trouble with this bug, please let us know!

Fix for Text Outline crashes¶

A number of users have reported crashes when trying to change the color of text outlines via the Text tool. This problem was discovered and fixed in our 3.1 development code, and is now fixed in 3.0.6 as well.

Better transparency handling with filters and transforms¶

Certain image formats such as JPEG do not support transparency. GIMP respects those limitations when importing images, and does not automatically add transparency when opening them (unless you change this setting in Preferences). While this is important for advanced users, it can be confusing for people who are unfamiliar with image formats.

In GIMP 2.10, some special-casing was done to make certain filters and transforms work “as expected” even if the layer did not have transparency. These were removed during the code clean-up done during GIMP 3.0’s development, and unfortunately not restored before release. As a result, some users had reported odd results when applying Color to Alpha or rotating layers without transparency. Since then, we have developed more generalized code to automatically add transparency to layers when necessary, which should prevent those problems for unsuspecting users!

Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette¶

Due to how interconnected it was with other code changes, we back-ported a new feature from GIMP 3.1.2 - the ability to use theme colors for the brush, font, and palette dockables! You can read more about it in our original news post on the feature.

Updated non-destructive filter code¶

During the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting, our co-maintainer Michael Natterer spent a good deal of time reviewing, cleaning, and updating our non-destructive (NDE) filter code. These improvements have been backported to GIMP 3.0.6 to improve the stability of our filters, and to align the development and stable codebases so we can more easily resolve any remaining issues. Jehan made further performance improvements and clarified in the interface when filters can and can not be applied non-destructively. The code to apply NDE filters to channels was also backported.

Palette import updates¶

We fixed a bug related to importing Adobe Color Book (.acb) palettes CMYK and LAB palettes. We also updated our Palette Import dialogue to let you filter the view by the different palette formats that GIMP currently supports (including Adobe ASE, standard CSS, and GIMP’s own GPL format).

Printing improvements for flatpak¶

Again, to quote from our 3.1.4 news post:

New contributor Corentin Noël developed a fix for the Image Settings tab not appearing when printing in sandboxed applications like flatpak or snap. Due to restrictions, the tab will be created as a secondary dialogue instead - allowing you to edit those settings once again. This patch is a more future-proof version of an earlier attempt by BZZZZ creatively bypassing the sandbox portal. We appreciate the work of both contributors to fix this problem! This proposed solution is not ideal, UX-wise, compared to the original tab, but it is necessary because the portal print dialog is hardly usable without these settings.

Improvements for macOS¶

Our two main macOS contributors Lukas Oberhuber and Gabriele Barbero have worked to fix some important issues with our macOS build. One example of their efforts is fixing a crash when dragging a color to fill the canvas. This was caused by our new color management code being more strictly checked by macOS compared to Linux and Windows - we have switched to a custom application/x-geglcolor mimetype to prevent this issue on all our platforms. They also improved issues with multiple icons appearing in the macOS dock (such as when running a plug-in or script). For multi-window mode users, they also fixed A bug where the windows would “flash” back and forth a number of times.

If you are a macOS developer and are interested in helping triage more macOS issues, we’d appreciate your support!

Improved security for image imports¶

During development, we received reports from the Zero Day Initiative of potential security issues with some of our file import plug-ins. While these issues are very unlikely to occur with real files, developers like Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa proactively improved security for those imports.

The resolved reports are:

• ZDI-CAN-27793
• ZDI-CAN-27823
• ZDI-CAN-27836
• ZDI-CAN-27878
• ZDI-CAN-27863
• ZDI-CAN-27684

Build process improved¶

Jehan and Bruno backported all the build-related commits from the 3.1 development branch. For example, the nice automatic associations generation. Additionally, a bug that made it impossible for Python-based plug-ins to connect to the Internet on Windows and macOS is now fixed on the stable series.

AppImage users will also have a more reliable package from now on. The PS/EPS plug-in was restored to work on AppImage. Also, Bruno worked to make the AppImage based on Debian 13 trixie, which fixed many bugs at once, such as crashing at the file dialog when there is a .json file, some PyGObject limitations, incorrect colored subpixel rendering by Cairo and crashes when exporting JPEG 2000 images.

Similarly, the Flatpak manifest was updated to use the latest GNOME 49 runtime. So Flatpak users, you may remove the previous org.gimp.GIMP.HEIC extension if it is still installed, since GIMP now uses org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra instead.

Jehan, lillolollo, and Jacob Boerema have worked to remove a number of warnings produced when building GIMP. While most of these were harmless, it is good to get rid of them in order to have cleaner code and build output.

Assorted fixes¶

There are a variety of smaller fixes in this release as well. While we can’t exhaustively cover 600+ code updates (!), here are a few more of interest.

• Gabriele Barbero fixed a critical warning that could occur when adding a virtual device to GIMP as input.
• Cheesequake corrected a code typo that caused the layer boundary to not update correctly when moving with the arrow keys.
• Liam Quin prevented a potential crash that could occur if extension files were not in the right directory.
• Anders Jonsson caught more missing translatable text, like the JPEG 2000 dialogue header.
• Ondřej Míchal fixed a bug where file parameters were not being passed correctly in plug-ins.
• Estecka reported and then fixed a bug where the canvas would not center properly when zooming out. (This bug also existed in GIMP 2.10 but was offset by a second bug - we fixed that bug in 3.0 but not the original one, so the new problem appeared!)
• Alx Sa made several fixes to plug-ins, such as allowing the legacy Jigsaw filter to draw on transparent layers and fixing a bug in the Recompose filter to properly combine YCbCr decomposed images again.
• Jacob Boerema made several improvements to our metadata code, including using a more complete method to save time in Exif.Image.DateTime and fixing how comments are synchronized with the image when exported.

GEGL and babl¶

Øyvind Kolås has released new updates to babl and GEGL, the underlying color management engines for GIMP.

GEGL 0.4.64 contains a number of updates and fixes. Ondřej Míchal added OpenCL to the base GeglOperationPointComposer3 class, which means more filters can now support acceleration using the GPU. He and Øyvind Kolås also worked on making the filter testing process more robust. Jacob Boerema fixed the ZDI-CAN-27803 vulnerability for RGBE image imports. An update was made to the gegl:mirrors filter to redraw correctly on large images (this improves GIMP’s Kaleidoscope filter). Bruno Lopes and Jehan contributed many build process improvements and clean-up.

babl 0.1.116 brings a number of build process updates and script clean-ups by Bruno Lopes. You can also now check the version of babl in the commandline with a --v flag thanks to Joe Da Silva.

Release Stats¶

Since GIMP 3.0.4, in the main GIMP repository:

• 20 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 10 merge requests were merged.
• 817 commits were pushed.
• 15 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, Galician, Georgian, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

38 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.6 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 18 developers to core code: Michael Natterer, Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Niels De Graef, Gabriele Barbero, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Estecka, Cheesequake, Christoph Reiter, Joey Riches, Liam Quin (ankh/demib0y/barefootliam), Lukas Oberhuber, cheesequake, lillolollo, lloyd konneker, luzpaz.
• 12 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, lloyd konneker, Niels De Graef, Corentin Noël, Gabriele Barbero, Lukas Oberhuber, Natanael Copa, Ondřej Míchal.
• 16 translators: Yuri Chornoivan, Martin, Luming Zh, Ekaterine Papava, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alexander Shopov, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Nathan Follens, luming zh, Alan Mortensen, Danial Behzadi, Emin Tufan Çetin, Jordi Mas, Yago Raña.
• 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Niels De Graef.
• 12 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Michael Natterer, Jehan, lloyd konneker, Jacob Boerema, Niels De Graef, Ondřej Míchal, Sam James, Christoph Reiter, Joey Riches, Natanael Copa, Rico Tzschichholz.
• 3 contributors on other types of resources: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Joey Riches.
• The gimp-data submodule had 22 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Aryeom.
• 3 image creators: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Aryeom.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• ctx had 7 commits since 3.1.4 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind Kolås.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 10 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber.
• The flatpak release had 38 commits by 2 contributors (and bots): Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 103 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Guillaume Turri.
• Our developer website had 51 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson.
• Our 3.0 documentation has a new translation in Esperanto and had 83 commits by 11 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Marco Ciampa, Alevtina Karashokova, Nathan Follens, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson, Andre Klapper, Kristjan Schmidt, Matthew Leach, jtux270.

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions.

Around GIMP¶

Team News¶

Our GSoC 2025 students Gabriele Barbero and Ondřej Míchal have been added to the Core Team in our GitLab repository! This is in response to the excellent work they have done over the summer and continued to contribute afterwards.

Download Mirrors¶

Since the 3.0.4 news post, a new mirror have been contributed:

• in Germany by Funkfreunde Landshut

Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP.

Downloading GIMP 3.0.6¶

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

• Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit)
• Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware
• macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc).

What’s Next¶

While the bulk of the work is ongoing on the main development branch (for upcoming GIMP 3.2), we felt this new stable 3.0 release was really needed, as more bug fixes accumulated. We highly recommend to update GIMP to this latest version for production work.

In the meantime, for more adventurous creators, curious people, and in particular anyone who would like to be a part in the creation of a better creative software, we also encourage you to try out our GIMP 3.1.4 development version (experimental release for the future GIMP 3.2) and report bugs or suggest User Experience improvements.

GIMP is first and foremost a Community, Free Software. What happens in it is what we all make of it. By contributing, you make it your software! 🤗

In any case, our accelerated release schedule seems to be going pretty well so far, and we are pretty happy of how GIMP 3.2 is taking shape!

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!