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Comment by Drdrdrq | Hacker News Reader

Great, lots of new features. But the crucial thing for me is still marked "wontfix": allow saving to external formats directly.

I often open some png or jpeg, edit it and want to save it. But no, I have to export it, confirm that I want to overwrite the file I am editing, and then confirm that I don't want to save to .xcf before closing file or Gimp. Infuriating. It makes me want to fork it just fix this nonsense, but I doubt anyone would want to go into trouble to install my fork. If gimp team don't want to change default behaviour they could at least add a setting to .gimprc: insane_export_behaviour=off. I know I would use it.</rant>

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I haven't used Photoshop in quite a few years, but I'm pretty sure it works (or worked) the same way as Gimp. Maybe people who do a lot of work in image editing software are accustomed to this workflow? It seems reasonable, since exporting flattens layers and such, which a professional would probably want to preserve (and may not want to risk accidentally losing).

IIRC, the workflow in Photoshop is this: If you open a photo file, and when you press save there is only one layer in the file, pressing ctrl+s will not change the file format. Generally this means that minor changes (crop, recolor) preserve file types, while larger ones require you to export.

In PS you have "save as" dialogue in which you pick extension, and "save for web" which additionally lets you fine-tune optimisation.

In gimp ctrl+s brings you "save image" dialogue that explictly forbids you from saving anything but XCF, which I too find very annoying when doing quick fixes in batch of graphics that don't have xcf source.

I've taken to using the "File > Overwrite $filename..." option.

I don't use PS, but in my use case this behaviour is really annoying. Maybe I am not their target user, I don't know - the problem is that Gimp is really nice piece of software and it is exactly what I need.

I am baffled why they changed this and why they stick to this decision. But it looks like there is a plugin which fixes that (see one of the other answers), so - yay! :)

I'm using 2.8.10, and this behavior seems fixed. If you open a JPEG or PNG, there's now a menu option in File called "Overwrite file.jpg". If you do an export, this menu option is replaced with "Export to file.jpg" that repeats your last export without a dialog box. The shortcut is Ctrl+E.

The Overwrite option has been in there a long time and is essentially just an alias for the Export funtionality. Although it does help alleviate the situation, I totally agree with what Drdrdrq is saying - just make Ctrl-S work properly!

I don't think it's really clear that this is proper behaviour, though? If we're talking JPGs, every time you go through opening that file and "saving" it, it's going to be more and more mangled by the compression. (Also, each time you have to ask yourself "how much do I want to mangle it this time?" - which doesn't make sense). Effectively, the file you save definitely does not preserve what you have in the editor. On the other hand, with the current behaviour, Ctrl-S provides a certain guarantee that the output will be lossless.

And, sure, one can go off and appeal to nature and say "it's standard," but, I really don't buy that argument. There really isn't that much software that deals with the same stuff as GIMP. This isn't like a text editor or something. They are very much in a position to set their own standards when the defacto behaviour is wrong.

It's not just lossy compression you lose things like layers and stuff when you flatten the file to a bitmap.

In the general sense this is the correct behaviour but in the specific instance of doing simple bitmap manipulation like cropping "export as save" is expected and since thats the most common use case for many people it's probably frustrating.

To be perfectly honest people using gimp for image cropping should use something else, gimp gui is clunky, it starts slowly and there is no benefit.

There's a plugin for that :)

Maybe this is for you: https://github.com/akkana/gimp-plugins/blob/master/save-expo...

THANK YOU!!! Didn't know that, will try it as soon as I can. You made my day. :)

As a user of GIMP for what must be about 13 years (?) - this is the most retrograde change I can recall. I understand it philosophically, but it definitely feels like holding purity of a metaphor above established usability norms.

This used to be the default, in some older GIMP versions. There are good reasons for the change, but I agree with you - I should be able to doubleclick a png, edit it, save and quit. A config option would be just fine.

Managing a famous software, with each release we get "Good release but the crucial thing for me is that they didn't fix feature-X-for-me". However, in the current situation, I confirm that Gimp is obnoxious in claiming that other formats don't exist.

Second that, this is the only way I, and I suspect many others, ever use GIMP. The default save system is completely unintuitive in that context.

If that is your primary use case, all you need to do is to assign Ctrl+S to Overwrite command instead. Boom, you got your saving back.

And assuming you have dynamic keyboard shortcuts turned on (and why wouldn't you? Best thing ever.) this is about as painless as it gets.

Not really, no. I just use Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts to configure GIMP, since it doesn't happen very often. (I didn't assign Ctrl+S to Overwrite for myself though, I like the new behaviour.)

I think the perfect work flow would be to automatically save a .xfc(could even be hidden) file and a name_edit.png file.

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