GIMP 3.2 RC2: Second Release Candidate for GIMP 3.2
After several weeks of bugfixes and polishing, we’re ready to share our second release candidate for GIMP 3.2!
As the GIMP team continues to close issues, the release of 3.2 gets nearer, with many new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Please do continue to report problems you find to help us make GIMP as good as possible!
Release Highlights¶
While there are no major new features in this release, we do want to highlight some of the more impactful fixes and some minor updates. The full changelog can be read in our code repository.
You may also notice that we got a second splash screen image, also created and contributed by astronomer Mark McCaughrean. It is a shot of the same area of space as for the first splash image candidate, the “Trapezium Cluster & inner Orion Nebula”, again captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, but this time in the short-wavelength channel. The final 3.2 splash image shall be one of these two variants!
Removing Restrictions¶
In GIMP 2.10, you could not export an image unless you had a layer selected due to a limitation of our export API. Due to the improvements in GIMP 3.0, this is no longer required. Therefore, we’ve removed the code that prevents you from choosing the Save or Export options in the menu when there’s no layer selected.
Similarly, the Clipboard Brush and Clipboard Pattern previously had a size limit of 1024 pixels. This was because that was the largest safe value for 32 bit computers to handle. Since most users now have 64 bit computers, we’ve increased the limit to 8192 pixels for the 64 bit builds. This means artists can make and use much larger temporary brushes and patterns as they work.
Paths¶
GIMP has supported importing SVGs as paths for a long time. However, some SVG paths were shown incorrectly due to our import code being based on an older version of librsvg. Based on suggestions and assistance from Federico Mena Quintero, one of the lead developers of the library, we updated our code to better handle different types of SVG paths.
Paint Select Tool¶
The Paint Select tool has been in the test Playground section of GIMP since it was first developed by Thomas Manni in 2020. Recently, Jehan has begun reviewing it (and the Foreground Selection tool) as part of the planning for the GIMP 3.4 roadmap. He’s made a number of improvements already, both to the UI and to the tool’s performance.
Start-up time¶
We’ve received reports that GIMP takes a while to load for users with a large number of fonts. This includes our resident typographer, Liam Quin. They worked with Idriss Fekir to test a change to our font loading code that noticeably speeds up our loading time. This is an area we continue to work on, so if you notice any regressions, please let us know!
UX/UI¶
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Ondřej Míchal and Jehan have improved spacing between buttons in the Transform tool overlays to make it easier to click the right one.
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Notifications have been added to the Filter merge-down button when users try to merge down a filter on a non-raster layer.
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Gabriele Barbero fixed the wording on our Keyboard Shortcuts dialog to more clearly explain how to change a shortcut.
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Minor fixes have been made to the theme to prevent issues on certain platforms.
Minor Updates¶
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Jehan finished the stylus barrel rotation implementation in our earlier Mypaint Brush 2 port, connecting it to the Wheel value already recognized by GIMP. Note that very few styluses actually provide this feature, so it likely won’t impact your workflow unless you have one of the rare ones.
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Thanks to Alx Sa, our PSD importer now loads legacy Outer Glow layer effects. The filter information was already loaded in the PSD plug-in during GIMP 3.0’s development, it just was not rendered before.
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A long outstanding patch by Niels De Graef was finally merged to include a Bash completion file in GIMP. This feature shows the list of available options when pressing Tab in the command line. On a related note, the
--show-debug-menuoption is now visible in the command line--helpoption as well.
Minor Fixes¶
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Anders Jonsson noticed that our default PostScript unit was changed from
millimetersin GIMP 2.10 toinchesin GIMP 3.0, without the size being adjusted to match. He fixed the default setting to load images at the right size. -
Jacob Boerema fixed a bug for plug-in developers, where plug-ins set to be always available would not be usable when there was an open image with no layers added.
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Jehan and Gabriele Barbero corrected a mistake made during vector layer development that caused the offsets not to be visible in the Layer Attributes dialog.
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We now prevent loading XCF files as link layers when it will create an infinite loading cycle (if the linked XCF itself loads the initial XCF, at any level).
Security¶
Alx Sa and Gabriele Barbero have implemented fixes for the following Zero Day Initiative reported issues on some of our image plug-ins:
- ZDI-CAN-28311
- ZDI-CAN-28273
- ZDI-CAN-28158
Build Process¶
Thanks to Jehan‘s work, babl and GEGL can now be compiled as relocatable! This is especially useful for builds where the build prefix is not the same as the runtime prefix. As a result, two bugs were fixed on the AppImage package: the GEGL filters are now fully localized and the third-party GEGL filters can now be found and used on those environments.
He also fixed a bug that affected not only the AppImage but other environments too: the language list sometimes was not being displayed translated in the Preferences dialog. Now, when building GIMP, it will instruct packagers to prevent that.
A user named Kruthers contributed a fix for a long-standing bug on AppImage: the inability to run CLI commands that point to relative paths. Thanks to their fix, the AppImage is now even more on par with a regular installation of GIMP.
Bruno re-implemented support for building GIMP on Windows with the MSVC
compiler, which is now possible due to the existence of the clang-cl wrapper
(we used to have direct MSVC support, without a wrapper, but it stopped working).
As a result, we now have build logs about correct Windows API usage etc.
But note that we will not distribute MSVC binaries, because, after all,
they mostly depend on MSYS2 due to vcpkg design which has much fewer features.
In short, MSYS2 is still the recommended way to build GIMP on Windows.
GEGL and babl¶
Øyvind Kolås has released new updates to babl and GEGL, the underlying color management engines for GIMP.
As noted above, babl 0.1.118 and GEGL 0.4.66 have been updated to be compiled as relocatable. In addition, a number of contributors have done some code clean-up and build process updates to GEGL.
Release stats¶
Since GIMP 3.2.0 RC1, in the main GIMP repository:
- 40 reports were closed as FIXED.
- 24 merge requests were merged.
- 201 commits were pushed.
- 13 translations were updated: Basque, Chinese (China), Danish, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.
23 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.0 RC2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):
- 10 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Anders Jonsson, Gabriele Barbero, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Sabri Ünal.
- 6 developers to plug-ins or modules: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal, Gabriele Barbero, Anders Jonsson, lloyd konneker.
- 13 translators: Sabri Ünal, Aefgh Threenine, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Yuri Chornoivan, Anders Jonsson, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Martin, Ekaterine Papava, luming zh, Alan Mortensen, Marco Ciampa, dimspingos, Aurimas Černius.
- 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Jehan.
- 5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jernej Simončič, Niels De Graef, Øyvind Kolås.
- 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Niels De Graef.
- The gimp-data submodule had 3 commits by 1 contributor: Jehan.
- The splash images for the 3.2 series were authored by Mark McCaughrean under license Creative Commons By-SA 2.0.
Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):
- Our UX tracker had 1 reports closed as FIXED (and many more incrementally worked on).
- babl 0.1.118 is made of 36 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Joe Da Silva.
- GEGL 0.4.66 is made of 62 commits by 11 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Jehan, Sabri Ünal, Alfred Wingate, Ondřej Míchal, Alan Mortensen, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Jeremy Bícha, Marco Ciampa, Ulf Martin Prill.
- ctx had 40 commits since 3.2.0 RC1 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind Kolås.
- The
gimp-macos-build(macOS packaging scripts) release had 3 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber. - The flatpak release had 6 commits by 1 contributor: Bruno.
- Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 27 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Sabri Ünal.
- Our developer website had 25 commits by 2 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes.
- Our 3.0 documentation had 24 commits by 6 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Anders Jonsson, Matthew Leach, Richard Gitschlag, 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.
Around GIMP¶
Books¶
Sabri Ünal has been hard at work updating our books page. In addition to historial books about prior versions of GIMP, we now have listings for several GIMP 3 books. If you know of any books on GIMP that we’re missing, please let us know!
Note: We are not interested in listing or promoting books that are generated from GenAI. Please check if the book was authored by a person before submitting. Thanks!
Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC2¶
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).
There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation.
What’s next¶
This is nearly it! We are so close to GIMP 3.2 release that we can feel it in the air. When I first introduced the new accelerated release policy, I was both confident and wary of falling short. In the end, I’m quite satisfied; it really worked out well for this first iteration. 😄
Considering how few reports of major issues we had during this RC1, this might be the last release candidate, though only the coming period will tell. Sometimes people, mistaking us for a corporation, ask us about quality assurance policy or the like. Well we are not a company, we are a community and our QA is the world, it’s me, you, anyone. Therefore we really really enjoin everyone to test this development version and report any issue you find, especially if it feels like it should be a blocker issue.
Among the few things which come to mind, I had to touch and reorganize
our XCF-loading code for detecting link layer cycles; and as you may
imagine, this is a very sensitive area of our codebase. So we welcome
massive testing in file loading and link layer creation during this RC2
phase, in order to detect any regression!
And of course, any deep testing, especially of the new link and vector
layers,
but also of any other major feature you are often using will be very
appreciated. We want to avoid both releasing broken new features,
and adding regressions to existing features.
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! Wouldn’t it be fitting with the coming holiday season? 🎁🎄🤗
In the meantime, we’ll continue to work hard for delivering GIMP 3.2.0 soon, and wish you all a very nice holiday season and a lot of fun and joy with family and friends! 🥳🍾🥰
















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Before the main conference, all 4 contributors attended the 

At the end of day one, we went for dinner with a bunch of folks from various Indian FOSS communities like OpenStreetMap India, Debian India, ILUG-D (India Linux Users’ Group Delhi), ILUG-B, (India Linux Users’ Group Bengaluru), etc. A group picture taken just before the dinner is shown on the right.














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