We are happy to announce the fourth micro-release GIMP 3.0.8! As we close in on the release of GIMP 3.2, we wanted to share with you what may be the last set of bugfixes for GIMP 3.0.

Release Highlights¶

Micro releases like 3.0.8 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions. While this news post is not an exhaustive list of all fixes, we wanted to highlight some of the ones with a more noticeable impact.

Font Loading Performance¶

Improvements in start-up time for users with a large number of fonts was backported from our 3.2 RC2 release. As a result, we now wait to load images until fonts are initialized - this prevents some occasional odd displays and other issues when an XCF file tried to access a partially loaded font.

For macOS users, we have special-cased the legacy Skia font, as we received reports that it did not behave properly with the Pango library we use to render fonts. You should now be able to use all fonts weights instead of just Bold.

Assorted updates and fixes¶

Daniel Plakhotich helped us identify an issue when exporting a lossless WEBP image could be affected by lossy settings (such as Quality being less than 100%). We’ve updated our WEBP plug-in to prevent this from happening.
Jehan fixed a bug in the Windows installer where text would be duplicated in certain languages.
René de Hesselle diagnosed an issue with font kerning on macOS, which was fixed by Jehan.
Because of differences in how different operating systems represent file paths, default color profiles were not being loaded correctly on start-up on Windows. This should now be fixed, though you may need to reassign your default color profiles in Preferences to clear out the older, incorrect file path.
Thanks to Jehan‘s efforts, the standard gimp-3.0 executable can now be run with a --no-interface flag instead of requiring users to call gimp-console-3.0 even on devices with no display. The --show-debug-menu flag is now visible as well.
programmer_ceds improved our flatpak by adding safe guards to show the correct configuration directory regardless of whether XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined on the user’s system. This should make it much easier for flatpak users to install and use third party plug-ins.
We fixed a rare but possible crash when using the Equalize filter on images with NaN values. Images that contain these are usually created from scientific or mapping data, so you’re unlikely to come across them in standard editing.
Jeremy Bicha fixed an internal issue where the wrong version number could be used when installing minor releases (such as the 3.2 release candidates and upcoming 3.2 stable release).
As noted in our 3.2RC2 news post, we have updated our SVG import code to improve the rendered path.
Further improvements have been made to our non-destructive filter code to improve stability, especially when copying and pasting layers and images with filters attached to them. Some issues related to applying NDE filters on Quick Masks have also been corrected.
An unintended Search pop-up that appeared when typing while the Channels dockable was selected has been turned off.
When saving XCFs for GIMP 2.10 compatibility, we unintentionally saved Grid color using the new color format. This caused errors when reopening the XCF in 2.10. This problem has now been fixed! If you encounter any other XCF incompatibility, please let us know.

Themes and UX¶

The Navigation and Selection Editor dockables no longer show a large bright texture when no image is actively selected. This was especially noticeable on dark themes.
When a layer has no active filters, the Fx column had the same “checkbox” outline when hovered over as the lock column. This led to confusion about clicking it to add filters. We have removed the outline on hover as a small step to help address this.
Ondřej Míchal fixed alignment and cut-off issues with the buttons on our Transform tool overlays. All buttons should now be properly centered and visible.
The options for filling layers with colors when resizing the canvas will be turned off when not relevant (such as when you set layers to not be resized).
More GUI elements such as dialog header icons will now respond to your icon size preferences.
Ondřej Míchal has continued his work to update our UI with the more usable Spin Scale widget. He has also updated the widget itself to improve how it works for users and developers alike.

Security fixes¶

Jacob Boerema and Gabriele Barbero continued to patch potential security issues related to some of our file format plug-ins. In addition to existing fixes mentioned in the release candidate news posts, the following exploits are now prevented:

ZDI-CAN-28232
ZDI-CAN-28265
ZDI-CAN-28530
ZDI-CAN-28591
ZDI-CAN-28599

Another potential issue related to ICO files with incorrect metadata was reported by Dhiraj. It does not have a CVE number yet, but it has been fixed for GIMP 3.0.8. Jacob Boerema also fixed a potential issue with loading Creator blocks in Paintshop Pro PSP images.

As part of GIMP 3.0.8, we also updated several dependencies to prevent vulnerabilities. Thanks to Bruno Lopes, our Windows installer now uses a newer version of Python due to several CVEs in Python 3.12.11. We also updated our SVG library librsvg 2.61.3 to prevent a possible NTLM authentication exploit when loading a malicious SVG.

API¶

For plug-in and script developers, a few new public APIs were backported to GIMP 3.0.8. gimp_cairo_surface_get_buffer () allows you to retrieve a GEGL buffer from a Cairo surface (such as a text layer). Note that this deprecates gimp_cairo_surface_create_buffer ().

gimp_config_set_xcf_version () and gimp_config_get_xcf_version () can be used to specify a particular XCF version for a configuration. This will allow you to have that data serialized/deserialized for certain versions of GIMP if there were differences (such as the Grid colors mentioned above).

Fixes were made for retrieving image metadata via scripting. GimpMetadata is now a visible child of GExiv2Metadata, so you can use standard gexiv2 functions to retrieve information from it.

Original thumbnail metadata is also now removed on export to prevent potential issues when exporting into a new format.

Packaging improvements on macOS¶

Bruno Lopes and Lukas Oberhuber worked on some packaging fixes for macOS:

Image Graph is now available (if GIMP is run with --show-debug-menu)
Thai language interfaces have proper word breaking
EPS and PS files can be opened again
Dialogs should receive focus again thanks to a patch on GTK3
GIMP icon is not tiny anymore on macOS 26 Tahoe (we plan to support Liquid Glass effects in the future)
Configuration migrations between GIMP 2.10 and 3.0 should be more robust now.

Help Manual¶

Our documentation maintainer Jacob Boerema has released a new version of the GIMP 3.0 help manual. Version 3.0.2 of the manual includes updated information on non-destructive filters, changes in the Align tool, and more. Updates to fifteen translations have been made as part of this release.

Special thanks to Sabri Ünal for their work in standardizing formatting across the help manual and reducing the need to retranslate duplicate text.

babl¶

Øyvind Kolås has released a new update for babl, our color space engine. Version 0.1.120 adds support for the x86_64-v4 microarchitecture for code optimizations.

Release Stats¶

Since GIMP 3.0.6, in the main GIMP repository:

26 reports were closed as FIXED.
468 commits were pushed.
12 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Danish, Georgian, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.

28 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.8 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

8 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Gabriele Barbero, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, James Addison, aruius.
9 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, Anders Jonsson, Dr. David Alan Gilbert, Gabriele Barbero, lloyd konneker.
14 translators: Aefgh Threenine, Ekaterine Papava, Martin, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Sabri Ünal, dimspingos, Aurimas Černius, Danial Behzadi, Luming Zh.
2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal.
5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jeremy Bícha, Jernej Simončič, Niels De Graef.
6 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jeremy Bícha, Niels De Graef, Sabri Ünal.
The gimp-data submodule had 16 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jeremy Bícha.

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

babl 0.1.120 is made of 5 commits by 2 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes.
ctx had 181 commits since 3.2.0 RC2 release by 1 contributors: Øyvind Kolås.
The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 27 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes.
The flatpak release had 20 commits by 1 contributor (and a bot): Bruno.
Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 103 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Sabri Ünal, Jacob Kauffmann, Petr Vorel, gturri.
Our developer website had 204 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan.
Our 3.0 documentation had 266 commits by 13 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, dimspingos, Marco Ciampa, Anders Jonsson, Alevtina Karashokova, Yuri Chornoivan, Matthew Leach, Richard Gitschlag, Andre Klapper, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Dick Groskamp, lloyd konneker.

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.

Downloading GIMP 3.0.8¶

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)
Linux Snaps 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/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit)

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

What’s Next¶

This might be the final release in the GIMP 3.0 series, unless some very ugly bug were to appear and we’d feel like making a better ending. We know indeed that some people are sometimes stuck longer on some series for various reasons (such as stable package policy in some Linux distributions, or because we do have to drop some platforms sometimes — which will soon be the case for 32-bit Windows by the way! —, and sometimes some people just prefer older GIMP!). Also we do introduce bugs with new feature code. Such is the life of software, either being stale and stabler, or evolving with higher risk of new bugs!

So whatever your reason, let’s make sure that you’ll have at least a very nice latest 3.0 build to get back too, if needed be. 😄

Now we are mostly focusing on the last few issues before starting the 3.2 series. We’ll get news about this soon.

In any case, we wish you all a very happy new Western year! May it be filled with a lot of joy, fun with GIMP too, and of course a healthy life. 🤗

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!

GIMP 3.0.8 Released