Before we travel to this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, we wanted to share a new release of GIMP! The second update of the 3.2 series, GIMP 3.2.4 contains more bugfixes and UX updates.

General Highlights¶

We continue to polish GIMP 3.2 in this release. Several new contributors have provided patches this time around, which is very exciting! For more details, check out our NEWS file in our code repository.

We’ve caught more cases where tools would accidentally rasterize link, text, and vector layers. For instance, the Edit > Fill with... menu options for colors and patterns now work the same as dragging and dropping colors onto non-raster layers. The Crop Tool now behaves more consistently and does not attempt to resize vector layers.
New contributor anenasa both reported and fixed an issue with the Text Outline feature being cut off with vertical oriented text.
One for the record books - Jehan fixed a bug in our XCF code that’s existed since 1999! He’s also added code to correctly load XCFs made with and without this bug, as backwards compatibility with XCF project files is very important to us.
Sometimes a bug fix can create other, unrelated bugs. A fix we made in GIMP 3.2.2 caused some text layers to become uneditable after reloading them from an XCF file. Jehan found and fixed the new bug, so you should be able to edit both XCFs created in 3.2.2 and new ones.
Speaking of text, Gabriele Barbe has fixed an issue where rotating the canvas rather than the image could cause the on-canvas text editor to appear in the wrong place when moved.
New contributor balooii fixed a crash that could occur when selecting a non-existant filter tag in a plug-in like GFig.
Security contributors bb1abu, HanTul, Rakan Alotaib, JungWoo Park, and Bronson Yen studied our image import plug-ins and reported several possible issues. We appreciate their code review and mitigation suggestions! Gabriele Barbe and Alx Sa implemented their suggestions for APNG, PAA, PNG, DDS, PSP, PNM, PSD, JIF, PVR, TIM, XWD, and SFW files.
The OpenRaster format stores layers as PNGs and notes their opacity in a separate settings file. Our export plug-in saved that setting but also exported the PNG with the same opacity, resulting in higher transparency when reloaded. We’ve fixed this so now layers are saved with 100% opacity, thus ensuring they reopen correctly.
New contributor Ahmed E. Yassin fixed a bug where exporting metadata in our Metadata Viewer could result in empty files.
New contributor Kaushik B fixed a bug in the Open as Layers feature where multi-layer XCF files would have their layer names changed on import.
Balooii also fixed an issue on Wayland where the tool cursor icon might disappear when moving it.
New contributor v4vansh resolved an issue where the image tab preview wouldn’t correctly update after switching between grayscale and RGB color modes.
Bruno Lopes added support for the macOS ScreenCaptureKit to our color picker feature. This allows us to use the newer API for macOS 12+.

Scanning on Windows¶

In GIMP 3.2.2, we dropped support for 32bit Windows builds. Unfortunately, our scanner plug-in was also lost since it required 32bit TWAIN drivers. We’ve now built a new Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) scanner plug-in to replace it. You can access it in the same place in the menu - File > Create > Scanner/Camera.

Note that because this plug-in uses a new Windows API, the scanning UI will likely look different than what you’re use to. You may also need to install new WIA-compatible drivers for your scanner to make it work correctly.

UX/UI and Performance Improvements¶

The Welcome Dialog now shortens long file names in the Create page to prevent the dialog window from stretching too far out. This UX feature was lost when we updated the Welcome Dialog to a new API, but it is now restored. You can still see the full name by hovering over the image preview or name.
New contributor infinity improved performance when making selections inside a large image with Intersection Mode enabled. Their fixes allows GIMP to only consider pixels within the existing selection rather than trying to calculate across the entire image. This can lead to a significant speed-up!
Aruius raised the maximum UI image size to 8192 pixels. This should allow the Gradient Editor dock and other docks with images to expand much further on larger displays.
When moving a floating layer or selection, the “marching ants” outline is temporarily turned off. This provides a noticable boost in performance and less lag.

Script and Plug-in Developers¶

An oversight when updating the GimpUnit API for 3.0 caused functions that accept units of measure to not allow setting it to pixels. This has been fixed now. You can test this in functions like gimp_context_set_line_width_unit () and gimp_vector_layer_set_stroke_width_unit ().
The gimp_quit () function has now been deprecated. You can continue to use it for GIMP 3.x, but it will be removed in the eventual GIMP 4.x release. Instead, you should use a return statement with GIMP_PDB_EXECUTION_ERROR and an GError variable with an explanation of why the plug-in needed to quit.
A new gimp_resources_loaded () function has been added by Jehan. You can use this to determine if a resource (like brushes, patterns, fonts, etc) has been loaded in GIMP before trying to use it in your plug-in.
Several deprecated Script-fu functions (such as gimp-drawable-brightness-contrast and gimp-drawable-threshold) in our official scripts have been converted to using GEGL filters via the gimp-drawable-merge-new-filter API. You can check out how to use them in your own scripts by browsing our repository.

Around GIMP¶

Libre Graphics Meeting¶

The Libre Graphics Meeting takes place next week, April 22nd through the 25th. You can find more details in our last news post. If you’re planning to attend, feel free to come by and say hello!

Translation¶

We now have the beginnings of Laotian translation of GIMP! If you know the language and are interested in contributing translations, feel free to reach out to the translation team for more information.

New Mirror¶

AFRICLOUD has graciously offered to serve as a mirror for GIMP downloads.

Mirrors help GIMP be available for download at high speeds wherever you are in the world.

Does your organization wish to be one of our official mirror sponsors? Create a request to become an official mirror!

Release Stats¶

Since GIMP 3.2.2, in the main GIMP repository:

45 reports were closed as FIXED.
21 merge requests were merged.
258 commits were pushed.
18 translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Cornish, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Georgian, Italian, Kazakh, Lao, Norwegian Nynorsk, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

30 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.4 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

11 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Gabriele Barbero, balooii balooii, Anders Jonsson, anenasa, aruius, infinity, kaushik_B, v4vansh.
6 developers to plug-ins or modules: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Ahmed E. Yassin, Gabriele Barbero, infinity.
19 translators: Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alan Mortensen, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Marco Ciampa, Martin, Anders Jonsson, Ekaterine Papava, Jan Papež, Jose Riha, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Denis Rangelov, Flynn Peck, João Pedro Pitarelo, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Saikeo Kavhanxay, acey dot, Марко Костић.
3 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa.
3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson.
The gimp-data submodule had 2 commits by 2 contributors: Anders Jonsson, Jehan.

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

Our UX tracker had 1 report closed as FIXED.
ctx had 43 commits since 3.2. release by 2 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes.
The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 5 commits by 1 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber.
The flatpak release had 6 commits with work by 3 contributors: Bruno, Ondřej Míchal, Jehan.
Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 45 commits by 3 contributors: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes.
Our developer website had 15 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Richard Gitschlag.
Our 3.0 documentation had 64 commits by 3 contributors: Марко Костић, Marco Ciampa, Kolbjørn Stuestøl.

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 3.2.4¶

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).

What’s Next¶

We still have a few bug fixes being working on, yet we are starting to feel more confident in the stability of the GIMP 3.2 series. Therefore we are on the verge of branching out development into stable and unstable branches. What does it mean? Well, that we will start to seriously work on the fancy new features planned for the GIMP 3.4 series while the 3.2 series will continue to receive only bug and security fixes, aiming for stability.

Exciting times ahead!

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 3.2.4 Released