We’re happy to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.6! This stable release contains several months worth of patches, bug fixes, security updates, and more from new and longtime contributors.

Special thanks to Bruno Lopes, who has taken charge of backporting fixes from our development branch to the 3.2 stable branch.

This news posts provides an overview of the changes since GIMP 3.2.4. For a more detailed review, check out the NEWS changelog.

General Highlights and UX Improvements¶

A number of the fixes we first mentioned in our last development update were backported to GIMP 3.2.6.

Cheesequake has added code so you can use Cut on a layer group. This will allow you to cut the same section of all layers in the group, provided they are rasterized and not locked. Jehan made further improvements to this code.

The Sample Merged option for the Color Picker tool should now include any filters applied to a single layer when selecting colors. This was originally ignored due to an older optimization used for single layer images.

Balooii made many improvements to boost performance when loading a large number of fonts. While some lag remains and will likely require us to update to GTK4, the initial GIMP start-up, typing in the text tool, and closing font lists should be much faster!

Ondřej Míchal and Jehan have begun making changes to GIMP’s codebase to support an eventual GTK4 port. This includes swapping out the deprecated gtk_widget_show () functions with gtk_widget_set_visible (), replacing direct access to GdkEvent types with getter functions, replacing GDK_WA_CURSOR flags for explicit gdk_window_set_cursor () calls, and more. Even though we are not yet planning a GTK4 port, it doesn’t hurt to start preparing for it!

New contributor Ryan McDonald and Idriss Fekir have fixed an issue where the end of a line might be hidden on the left/right side when the text layout is set to “fixed”. When loading older XCFs, the problem will still be visible, but any changes to the text layer will update it to the correct view.

Kaushik B. has fixed an issue with the Heal Tool where you might get dark smudges if you move outside the bounds of a layer that’s smaller than the image canvas.

New contributor Manu Cornet and Jehan fixed a crash that could happen in certain circumstances when pressing keys too quickly after releasing the spacebar when panning.

Brandon Henderson reduced the sensitivity of the pan gestures when using the touchpad on macOS. This should make it easier to make fine-grain adjustments while editing an image on that platform!

Richard Gitschlag has adjusted the Text Tool so that you can still select the text to edit even if it has a layer mask that partially covers it.

Jacob Boerema resolved a bug in our metadata code that prevented GIMP from loading the Licensor metadata for an image.

Alx Sa added a maximum width of tooltips, preventing options with long descriptions from filling the entire screen.

Rodrigo Lledó Milanca updated our information on the ART Camera RAW plug-ins.

Several bugs related to rasterized vector layers have been resolved. Thanks to BobsDaughter, teapot, and Richard Gitschlag for their testing and feedback!

New Rotation Stylus Dynamics Input¶

Jehan recently implemented a new dynamic input for painting - Rotation (also known as Barrel Rotation). This feature is prominently used in the original Wacom Art Pen and newer Wacom Art Pen 2 pens, and allows GIMP to react to how you have rotated the brush in your hand as you draw.

You can adjust this value for custom brushes in the Dynamics editor. The MyPaint Brush tool is integrated with this feature as well, so it will automatically pass the rotation on as you paint if your stylus supports it.

OS and Platform Specific Improvements¶

GIMP uses GTK3, a cross-platform library for GUIs, to display its windows, widgets, and more. While it does a very good job of this, GIMP requires a lot of very complex interactions, and sometimes this can expose bugs that are only visible on certain platforms.

Bruno Lopes has been hard at work making a staggering number of platform-specific improvements to make GIMP work better. These include (but are not limited to):

• Using “Server-side Decorations” for dialogs on KDE instead of GNOME-style “Client-side Decorations”. (In other words, the buttons appear at the bottom of the dialog instead of the header bar).

• Secondary “pop-up” windows such as the resource selection and metadata editor dialogs should now appear in front of the first dialogue on Windows and macOS.

• The System theme now uses your system’s defined accent colors on Windows and macOS.

• Many improvements to proper focus setting on Windows and macOS.

• Improvements to multi-window mode operations on Windows and macOS.

• More system theme leaks caught on KDE Breeze system themes. This should help with graphical glitches in the UI.

• We now depend on winflexbison on Windows for building the Image Map plugin. This fixes an issue where Windows users couldn’t reopen their image maps, even when created with GIMP.

• Send to Email now works on MS Windows too using MAPI (works with Thunderbird and Outlook Classic).

• Windows users can now use “Open With” on multiple files on start, without creating multiple instances of GIMP. This is consistent with how Linux and other platforms operate.

Because these improvements are wide-ranging, it is possible that we missed some interactions during testing that could cause a regression. If you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

New macOS Package¶

Starting with GIMP 3.2.6, the .dmg package is now created at the same time as the Linux and Windows packages. This has not been possible for many years!

We used to create binaries for macOS on a separate GitLab repository, which was mirrored to another repository on GitHub, which was connected to a proprietary CI service (CircleCI) which then was connected to a MacStadium runner. All of that with dozens and dozens of additional patches, scripts etc! As you can see, this was extremely complicated, but it was the only way to ship macOS binaries back then.

Thanks to your donations, we were able to sponsor a MacBook Pro M5 for Bruno Lopes, who has been working since December 19, 2025 to fix that situation. As a result, GIMP can now be easily built on macOS with both MacPorts and Homebrew packages.

The macOS version of GIMP is now much more integrated with system-specific features, similar to the Linux and Windows version. A few examples:

• Titlebars on macOS now follow the dark/light mode settings of the current theme.

• Scrollbars now follow the macOS preference for whether they should be always visible or not.

• The more standard ~/Library/Caches/ location is used for storing caches of GIMP resources, fixing a bug of brushes directory not being created on macOS.

• GIMP’s number input buttons now respond to Cmd on macOS, like they do to Ctrl on other platforms. Some standard Mac shortcuts like, Ctrl + F2, Cmd + Shift + //Cmd + Ctrl + Space and Cmd + ` work as well.

• Meta and Hyper modifiers now work.

• Incorrect offsets when drag-n-dropping colors and layers/channels/paths have been fixed.

• Filters now accept negative values regardless of your system language settings.

• Plug-ins are treated as children of the main GIMP application, so they do not appear in the dock anymore.

• GIMP custom cursors are now properly set for all tools (previously, they were being overwritten by the macOS arrow).

• “GIMP”, “Windows” and “Help” menus now match the standard macOS menus with proper localization.

• Dialogs that shouldn’t be minimized (such as the search actions dialog shown with /) no longer show a minimize button on macOS.

• Remote files can be opened thanks to using the native macOS API, since GIO does not support HTTPS on this platform.

• Dashboard Backtraces are now supported using libunwind from libSystem.

In the process of implementing all these improvements, the separate macOS “developer package” was dropped. It was created due to the limitations of the previous macOS build infrastructure and became unnecessary now that it is way easier to build GIMP on macOS.

Plug-in and script developers should use the new GIMP SDK instead, or build GIMP directly.

Again, this is a brand new package. So, if you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

Security updates¶

GIMP has added support for importing many different file formats over the years. In recent years, security detection tools have improved and found more and more potential exploits in open source software. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa have been busy testing and patching these.

For reference, the following Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) have been patched in this release:

CVE-2026-18301, CVE-2026-18304, CVE-2026-18302, CVE-2026-18303, CVE-2026-18305, CVE-2026-18306, CVE-2026-18307, CVE-2026-18308, CVE-2026-18309, CVE-2026-62438, CVE-2026-62439, ZDI-CAN-29400, CVE-2026-59087, CVE-2026-59088, CVE-2026-59089, CVE-2026-66757, CVE-2026-59090, CVE-2026-59091, CVE-2026-66758, CVE-2026-66759, CVE-2026-78465, CVE-2026-78475, CVE-2026-79902, CVE-2026-80101, CVE-2026-82324, CVE-2026-82328, CVE-2026-82330, CVE-2026-82343

We want to thank Jace, Brent Hull, Tristan Madani, Florent Saudel, bb1abu, Yukihiro Nakamura, Securin Disclose, and Zero Day Initiative for their security reports and suggestions. We also want to thank Michael Catanzaro for his help in organzing these reports and requesting CVEs for them.

For Plug-in/Script Authors and Builders¶

Our GdkPixbuf dependency minimum version has been updated to 2.32.0 due to an issue with Glycin printing a bunch of unnecessary messages on start-up related to a deprecated to-pixdata function.

PDB commands now only show error/warning messages when run in interactive mode. For non-interactive modes, you won’t see anything printed in the console on PDB function failure. Instead, you can check the return values of the function and provide any messages you want to users.

Jehan improved our method for checking if a plug-in has been updated since the last time you opened GIMP. Now we check creation time (ctime) instead of just modified time (mtime) since it might be always 0 on certain packages like flatpak. This should mean that changes you make during development are more likely to be loaded if you’re testing on flatpak.

Kamil Burda fixed documentation for integer and double types in the Procedure Browser.

Pranav P corrected a build issue that caused a freeze on s390x systems.

GIMP SDK¶

You can now build C plug-ins and GEGL filters from all the official packages we distribute by using the gimptool commandline tool. That is because we now ship all required headers and libraries for compiling (in total, less than 20MB).

Before now, this was possible only on flatpak and Snap. So, Bruno Lopes extended it to the AppImage, Windows and macOS packages. We call this new feature the “GIMP SDK”.

Take a look at the build instructions if you are interested.

Around GIMP¶

GIMP 3.2 Help Manual Updates¶

Jacob Boerema, maintainer of the GIMP help manual repo, has released an updated version that contains all the changes brought in GIMP 3.2. It is available online, or you can download it if you want to keep a local copy.

Historical News¶

Balooii has been working to restored older news posts that have been lost to the ages. You can now see almost all news posts from 2004 to 2008 on the main site now - just navigate back to that point in time in the archive.

GEGL and babl¶

GIMP 3.2.6 also shares a release with new versions of GEGL and babl by maintainer Øyvind Kolås!

babl 0.1.128 includes several fixes for building on macOS, initial WebAssembly support, and better checks at runtime for avx512 - all by Bruno Lopes.

GEGL 0.4.72 updates its OpenCL support to version 3.0. Ondřej Míchal worked on important stability fixes for the OpenCL code (though such code path is still disabled by default in GIMP). Jacob Boerema made several fixes to the RGBE file format import and export functions. Aruius made the GeglColor comparison functions public, for future use in better comparing comparing colors in GIMP and other software. Tal Regev added support for building GEGL using only MSVC, and Bruno Lopes added support for WebAssembly as well. Luigino Camastra added more security checks to prevent potential overflows.

More details can be found in the GEGL NEWS document!

Release Stats¶

Since GIMP 3.2.4, in the main GIMP repository:

• 179 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 104 merge requests were merged.
• 871 commits were pushed.
• 21 translations were updated: Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

58 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.6 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 22 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, Richard Gitschlag, Michael Natterer, programmer-ceds, Ahmed E. Yassin, Andreas Vukman, Estecka, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Manu Cornet, Petr Vorel, Ryan McDonald, balooii, cheesequake, kaushik_B, screem02, v4vansh, woot000.
• 14 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Dimitriy Ryazantcev, lloyd konneker, balooii balooii, Frank Teklote, Harsh Verma, Michal Vašut, Mike Gorse, Richard Allen, Rodhos.
• 23 translators: Dick Groskamp, luming zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Ekaterine Papava, Rodrigo Lledó, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Emin Tufan Çetin, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Jose Riha, Марко Костић, Rafael Coelho Costa, Trần Ngọc Quân, Vasil Pupkin, Balázs Úr, Carsten Drewes, Juliano de Souza Camargo, Kjartan Maraas, Sabri Ünal, Yaron Shahrabani.
• 3 theme designers: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal.
• 9 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Petr Vorel, Harsh Verma, Lukas Oberhuber, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, lloyd konneker.
• 3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Aryeom.
• The gimp-data submodule had 16 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson, Denis Rangelov, Lukas Oberhuber, balooii balooii.
• 4 image creators: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, Lukas Oberhuber.
• 1 icon designers: Denis Rangelov.
• 1 cursor designers: balooii balooii.

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

• Our UX tracker had 3 reports closed as FIXED.
• babl 0.1.128 is made of 70 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Jehan.
• GEGL 0.4.72 is made of 234 commits by 28 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Øyvind Kolås, luming zh, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Tal Regev, WarisMaqbool, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Dick Groskamp, Ekaterine Papava, Sabri Ünal, aruius, Alan Mortensen, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Chao-Hsiung Liao, DiGro, Marco Ciampa, Rodrigo Lledó, Saikeo Kavhanxay, Thomas Manni, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Марко Костић.
• ctx had 150 commits since 3.2.4 release by 3 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes, Tal Regev.
• The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 5 commits by 1 contributors: Jacob Boerema.
• The flatpak release had 35 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Erick555, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 182 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, balooii balooii, balooii, Liam Quin, Allan Day.
• Our developer website had 110 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, aruius, Ondřej Míchal.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 276 commits by 20 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Dick Groskamp, DiGro, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Marco Ciampa, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan, Марко Костић, Richard Gitschlag, Alx Sa, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Christian Kirbach, Mateusz Jastrząb, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Andre Klapper, Balázs Úr, Chas Belov, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Rodrigo Lledó, Víttor Paulo Vieira da Costa.

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 m

Downloading GIMP 3.2.6¶

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)
• 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¶

Work these days has mainly and already shifted to the development series which will eventually lead to GIMP 3.4 versions. For anyone who missed it, the Development Update, August 2026 news is interesting on this aspect. In the meantime, we will obviously still continue backporting bug fixes on the 3.2 series, of which GIMP 3.2.6 is a part of.

This new version should widely improve stability, and in particular it looks like macOS users should particularly appreciate it (thank Bruno for that)! We are also extremely thankful to the new skilled contributors the project has been getting. Don’t forget that, as long as you don’t use genAI in your toolset, everyone is very welcome to participate! 🤗

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!