Another point re EXIF ImageDescription. I notice that GIMP seems to be retaining this for some edits, but if you crop the image in any way, the ImageDescription is cleared. Please do not do this! It requires a manual addition of the original description every time -- if you happen to catch that the description is missing. Otherwise, the image description can go unlabeled on into the future. Keep these strings intact regardless of the edits performed and let the user change them during saving if they choose to do so.
I have not checked this for the UserComment or Comment fields, but the same issue applies.
Joseph's comment prodded me to respond as well. I've been using 2.10.34 and 2.10.36 a lot lately and I have not had this problem again. This is for the standard Ubuntu deb package on Xubuntu 22.04.4.
Well, maybe it's obvious, but I couldn't see any way for me to do that, so I created a new bug report. Possibly one of the developers can do this or merge the reports together. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion.
I reported this as a "feature request" five years ago and it never received any attention. Someone suggested that it needed to be re-posted as a bug. The original post is here so please reference it for more details and screenshots. I don't see a way to convert that "feature request" into a "bug".
In summary: The Rotation and Perspective Transformation tools display a pop-up dialog in the upper right corner overlaying the drawing area. These dialogs often are in the way of work which is very annoying. They, and all other pop-up windows, should be made moveable on the screen and once repositioned, with the new location being remembered and saved between invocations of GIMP.
Note that if you click on the up-arrow on these dialogs, the older style dialog appears which can then be moved. Why two dialogs? Just make them all repositionable with the new location saved and get rid of the older style.
Also, why a pop-up dialog at all? Couldn't the Rotation and Perspective information and buttons be added to the Tool Options area? Maybe the dialog should be made smarter so that it only appears if the Tools/Tool Option pane is not currently being displayed. Just a thought.
Is the bug reproducible? Always. This is current;y how Gimp works.
Reproduction steps:
Bruno, I'm not clear what you are saying. Do you mean that this should be a bug and not an enhancement request?
In any case, pop-up dialogs should always be able to be repositioned on the screen and their new location remembered. Dialogs that position themselves on the drawing area are always going to get in the way. This is particularly true for the Perspective dialog.
Another thought: Why isn't the info in Rotate and Perspective pop-up just included in the Tool Options area, eliminating the dialogs altogether.
This is not related to the scroll wheel. I'm using a Sun 3-button mouse with no scroll wheel.
I have had
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false
set in my .config/gtk-[23].0/settings.ini file for quite a long time. This fixes the scrollbar functionality for programs that honor the setting, but apparently GIMP does not. If GIMP is using some version of GTK (this is the Gimp Tool Kit isn't it?) then it should work, but doesn't. There needs to be a preference setting (or config file setting) in GIMP that implements this.
If someone ever looks into this, what would be perfect (but is likely totally impossible) would be a tool that, for every dialog, allowed the user to click on whatever button they desired to be set and remembered as the default. You would then never hear from any of us about this ever again! :-)
Of course this would need to be a feature of the underlying GUI toolkit(s) and not a part of GIMP itself.
"As long as camera brands make undocumented extensions to the exif format, it is impossible to retain everything the way it was. Exif doesn't lend itself to just skipping and copying the parts you don't know about because that can cause invalid metadata meaning you may not be able to read any metadata at all."
Since this bug was tickled again, I just want to add that in 2.10.36 this is still very much a problem and it is driving me absolutely crazy, with GIMP constantly destroying (deleting) the EXIF comment fields of files that I have carefully manually documented. If the problem cannot be fixed (and it sure looks as though it is unlikely that it will ever be made bulletproof) I would really appreciate it if there was, at the very least, an option that could be selected that would instruct GIMP to never touch the metadata in any way, and just pass it all through unmolested. I would never use GIMP to adjust EXIF data, and would like to know that it won't mangle anything supplied by either the camera or the user.
I'm no expert in what is going on under the hood, but other programs seem to be able to edit the metadata without mangling it.
Anyway, this isn't a rant but a request to do something that at least doesn't make things worse.
Regards.
Operating System:
Xubuntu 22.04.2
The layer group capability is great but I'd like to see it extended to more complex editing operations. For example:
When a layer group is selected it can be moved as a unit. However, if a selection is made within the group it would be great if the elements on all group layers could be cut/copied/pasted as a unit just as is done on an individual layer. If the target paste layer remains the group folder, all elements would remain on their respective layers. This same thing would be great if applied to individual layers chained together, but that sort of operation also currently fails.
The same thing could be applied to other editing operations such as bucket fill, etc.
I've been away for over a month and have not been using GIMP. I expect to be using 2.10.34 heavily in the next few months and will report my experience if I see it lock up again.
Good suggestion JJ Berry.
Regarding memory leaks, I now doubt that that's the problem because I'm experiencing the same sort of behavior on a rebooted system and new instance of GIMP, with the first photo I'm editing, so no situation for a leak to become a serious problem yet.
I just had another thought regarding this issue. I don't know how undo is actually being handled in GIMP, but wouldn't this typically be done through a series of setjmp(3) calls? If so, then why, when rewinding to an earlier point in the history, couldn't a single longjmp(3) be made directly to that point rather than having to unwind things step by step which is taking considerable time and is what I'm finding objectionable.
Now, there may well be a lot more going on than I'm aware of, but if it were possible to implement this sort of direct jumping between history points, I think it would speed things up considerably.
Operating System: Xubuntu 22.04.1
There is a 16 year old request (#194) for something like this, but it is now lost in the mists of time.
When you have Snap to Guides selected, you can do interesting things like clone in a vertical or horizontal direction with the clone point aligned with a guide and then being sure that the brush will snap to the guide at other points for perfectly aligned cloning. However, not everything is orthogonal. It would be great to be able to define an arbitrary guide line using a 2-point rubberband (like the measure tool) and then have tools snap to that new guide line.
This would be useful in all sorts of situation such as cloning parts of a building where a wall edge is angled on the frame. There are untold cases like this.
Thanks Jehan. I created a new bug report here:
I'll consider the trying the dev version after I look into the question of installing and managing a flatpak on my system.
This report started with issue #7357, but at the maintainers recommendation I am opening a new bug report because unlike that report, the keyboard and mouse remain active and I can easily kill the GIMP process by moving to another window of clicking on the [X] icon on GIMP's window.
I've started having GIMP completely hang (dead in the water) at completely unpredictable times. I believe this began back around 2.10.28 and it may or may not have happened while on Xubuntu 20.04 (I just cannot remember.) Prior to that, GIMP was extremely stable.
I've had GIMP hang after long editing sessions and also after very shortly restarting the program. It has hung when attempting to initiate (click) a command. It has hung during the middle of processing a command (blur, sharpen, perspective correction, etc.) It has hung immediately after finishing executing a random command. Today it has hung twice while simply placing a guide line. There is absolutely no way to predict when the hang will occur and any action associated with a hang can then be repeated with no problem after restarting GIMP. In the past I've given the program considerable time to self-correct but it never does. As I said, I can move the mouse, but cannot initiate any menu or keyboard shortcut command. GIMP simply has to be killed with the resulting loss of work. I'm typically working with 4000x6000 pixel jpg images so nothing outlandish there. In preferences I've set 60 undo levels, and a max undo history of 128MB. Since the hangs can occur shortly after restarting GIMP, I do not believe there is a memory cache or swap problem.
Is the bug reproducible? Completely random
Reproduction steps:
…
Expected result: No lock-up :-)
Actual result: Lock-up
No crash files, etc. Just dead in the water.
Xubuntu 22.04.1 GIMP 2.10.32
Just another post to reinforce the problem with 2.10.32. The hanging seems to be getting worse. I'm back to doing a lot of jpg photo editing and I'm seeing GIMP lock up two or three times a day. The last two cases occurred immediately after I dragged a guide line onto the image. This is immediately after opening a new 4000x6000 pixel jpg for editing, before any other actual editing operations are performed. This is the only image loaded. This is really becoming a serious problem.
I sure wish I could find a method to reproduce the problem, but so far it is unpredictable when it occurs. And yes, even though I've experienced many cases of GIMP locking up, I have always retained control of the keyboard/mouse and have been able to move out of the window and kill the locked process. For what it's worth, I don't remember these sorts of lock-ups with early versions of 2.10, but they seem to have started with later releases -- maybe around point release .28, but I really can't be sure about that.
Xubuntu 22.04.1 GIMP 2.10.32
Just tried to do a standard rectangular crop of the entire image and GIMP hung, causing the loss of 90 minutes worth of work. This is getting bad and making use of GIMP problematic. :-/
Operating System: Xubuntu 22.04.1
For various editing operations such a clone, sharpen, levels, hue, etc. you can use a selection to limit the area where the edit is applied.
I would like to suggest that something similar, which I will call a "fence" be implemented to restrict where selections themselves can be applied. For example, If you are selecting using the color tool or fuzzy select, it would be great if you could constrain where the selection would be applied. This is the idea of the fence. In its simplest form, it could be just the visible area on the screen limited by zooming into a region. But ideally it could be set/modified in the same way that the rectangular, ellipse or free select tools allow. This fence option could be placed on each of the selection tool menus and would be off by default. There could be a toggle where you go into/out of fence mode and constrain the region where further selections would be restricted. Possible this region could be outlined in some high-contrast color, or maybe the region outside of the fence could be greyed out to indicate that that area was currently inactive. A "clear fence" button would allow the fence to be quickly removed.
An example of why this might be useful: In landscape shots I often need to select the sky from the other content so that it can possibly be blurred slightly but definitely not sharpened along with everything else. In low contrast cases, this can be an involved operation that requires zooming in to the sky/land border and making fine selections using the fuzzy or color tools. I often find that when I zoom back out, a lot more than I bargained for has also been selected. If the zoomed view (or a rectangular region) was first fenced, then you could make the selection with confidence that there were not going to be any future surprises.
I hope that description was clear. Would others find something along these lines useful?
Follow up to my previous report. GIMP was open and idle for hours on my desktop with an unedited photo loaded. I pressed "u" to load Adjust Color Curves. The pop-up menu frame appeared and then the program hung without ever finishing rendering the menu.
It hung again (the next day) when I displayed the Sharpen (Unmask Sharp) menu.