We present the first micro-release of GIMP 3.2! Over the last two weeks, we’ve been collecting and responding to reports from you all, and have packaged fixes for some of the most common issues in this first “bugfix” version.

General Highlights¶

As with any major release, there’s always a few issues that are revealed when a much larger audience starts using the new software. We appreciate your reports, and hope this latest release squashes the major new issues!

When layers with certain filters (like Drop Shadow) were added to layer groups, the layers would stop rendering. While the data itself wasn’t lost, this was obviously inconvenient! Fortunately, Jehan diagnosed the problem and fixed the layer group display.
Thanks to excellent testing and reports by teapot and Richard Gitschlag, we’ve fixed a number of issues and overlooked uses for vector layers. New contributor balooii provided several key patches towards this effort.
When importing SVG paths in the Paths dock, the Scale imported paths to fit image option did not work correctly. This issue has been resolved and now properly scales the imported path based on user preference.
A number of image import plug-ins have been made more robust, including FITS, TIM, PAA, ICNS, PVR, SFW, and JIF.
The Paintshop Pro plug-in now correctly loads the active selection shape, instead of just the rectangle around the selection. Thanks to migf1 for providing sample images to help us test and fix this.
The PSD plug-in now imports all of the channels in a Multichannel mode PSD image. New contributer Frank Teklote has been busy improving support for importing more PSD features stored in TIFFs and JPEGs (such as layers and paths).
The legacy Tile filter now properly copies over the original image’s color profile to make sure the new tiled image is in the right color space.
Bruno Lopes has enabled the Send by Email feature in the Files menu on AppImages.
New contributor v4vansh has updated the manual page generation and updated it with new information from the 3.0 releases.
As previously announced, 32-bit Windows builds are now dropped. This, combined to some cleanup on shipped data, resulted on a .exe installer more than 100MiB smaller and running faster.

UX/UI Updates¶

While not the focus of this release, we were able to implement a few small improvements based on user and designer feedback from our UX site. We encourage everyone to participate in the discussion there - no coding required!

The Compute unique colors feature in the Histogram dock now recognizes if the image has an active selection, and if so, only counts the pixels in that area. This should further help pixel artists and others who need precise color counts.
When opening an image with rotation metadata, you can now click the preview image that you want to load, in addition to the Rotate or Keep Original buttons. This should make the process of choosing the initial image orientation a little clearer.
“Resource” selection buttons in plug-ins (such as fonts, brushes, gradients, and patterns) now support mnemonics! Hold the Alt key to see the underlined letter in their label, then press it to activate the button. This allows for faster keyboard navigation instead of requiring a mouse, for those users who prefer the option.
In the non-destructive filter pop-over menu, the Toggle Visibility button now adapts to the state of the filter stack. For example, if all filters are turned off individually then the button will automatically switch states so that clicking it toggles them back on (and vice versa).
New contributor Aditya Tiwari has restored the Tab shortcut label to the Hide Docks entry in the Windows menu. This had to be done in a specific way since the shortcut only applies when the canvas is active, instead of being a “global” shortcut.

Revamping macOS Build Process¶

Bruno Lopes have been working since December last year on modernizing our macOS infrastructure and overall macOS support. Right now, the macOS release process is a bit manual and slow. In the future, this should be done automatically from our GitLab CI.

These new builds are part of a big investment approved by the GIMP Committee and would not be possible without your donations so far. We would be happy for you to test them at the Automatic Development Builds section of the Development Downloads page so we don’t introduce regressions when these new builds are made official.

Around GIMP¶

GEGL¶

To supplement our release of GIMP, GEGL 0.4.70 was also released. This is mostly a bugfix release as well with core fixes to the GeglPath API, as well as fixes in the png-save and exr-save operations.

Various build improvements were performed too and some compiler warnings cleaned up.

New Mirror¶

Yamagata University in Japan has graciously agreed to serve as a new mirror for GIMP downloads.

This makes it our second download mirror in Japan. On this note, don’t forget that mirrors are important contributors to the project too. They help sharing the load for our dozens of thousands of daily downloads and ensure that everyone can have fast downloads. We clearly have more mirrors in some parts of the globe, and some regions would deserve to have more mirrors closeby.

If your organization wants to become an official mirror of GIMP and be mentioned in our list of mirror sponsors, you may simply create a request to be an +official mirror. 🤗

Release Stats¶

Since GIMP 3.2.0, in the main GIMP repository:

30 reports were closed as FIXED.
19 merge requests were merged.
200 commits were pushed.
10 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Esperanto, Finnish, Georgian, Polish, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

21 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

7 developers to core code: Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes, balooii, v4vansh, Aditya Tiwari.
5 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Frank Teklote, Jehan, Sabri Ünal.
11 translators: Марко Костић, Jiri Grönroos, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Anders Jonsson, Aleksandr Prokudin, Ekaterine Papava, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Mateusz Jastrząb, Rodrigo Lledó.
2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson.
4 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alfred Wingate, v4vansh.
3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, v4vansh.
The gimp-data submodule had 2 commits by 1 contributor: Jehan.

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

Our UX tracker had 2 reports closed as FIXED.
ctx had 44 commits since 3.2.0 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind Kolås.
The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 3 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Lukas Oberhuber.
The flatpak release had 5 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno, Ondřej Míchal. Thanks a lot to Ondřej helping more with this package!
Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 29 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jonathan D.
Our developer website had 18 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Ency.
Our 3.0 documentation had 20 commits by 6 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Marco Ciampa, Марко Костић, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan.

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 3.2.2¶

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 and 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).

Note: the macOS DMG packages are planned to be a bit late, because of sickness and lack of time of relevant volunteers. We hope to have them in the coming days.

What’s Next¶

Here we go! This is the first micro release in the GIMP 3.2 series. As often with the first version in a new series, GIMP 3.2.0 had a few annoying issues, and the most problematic of these was the bug where some layer groups would not render in specific conditions (when particular filters were used). This was the main bug warranting this early bug-fix release.

In a sense, this is still better than the start of our 3.0 series (where we had more annoying issues, though it was also quite a huge update!), yet we want to do better! This is why we’d like to remind you that GIMP is made by anyone who wants to help. We would really love to have more early testers trying to break things by actually doing deep testing with our test binaries. We should thank in particular ShiroYuki Mot and Anders Jonsson who have been tirelessly testing our releases. But that ain’t enough! If anyone wants to be added to the list of testers for future releases, please open a report on the gimp-web-devel tracker, and tell us which platforms (OS, etc.) in particular you wish to test. We will add you in our default release template, which should notify you every time we prepare a new version.

In terms of schedules, we are still mostly continuing to fix bugs but I am predicting that the bug-fixing spree should slow down soon. Then we will start working more explicitly on new fancy features. I.e. we’d start preparing GIMP 3.4 already! Stay tuned by following the news on our website!

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 3.2.2 Released