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Comment by jmalkin | Hacker News Reader

I love gimp, love that it's free, but I really wish they paid a little more attention to the usability

There's all these minor issues that get on your nerves

If it was just a bit more user friendly, I would not need Photoshop

In 1995 or so, gimp was first released. Everyone loved it, but complained about usability (floating palettes, etc.). Maintainers, various devs, the crowd all said "it's open source, we can fix it".

In 2019, gimp made it's most recent release. Everyone loved it, but complained about usability. Maintainers, various devs, (plugin authors), the crowd all said "it's open source, we can fix it".

It's unlikely to get "fixed". Everything has quirks. But given how great it is on the whole, I suspect we'll see it continue to grow for another 20 or years, with similar complaints on usability for each release.

In this world of ever-changing everything, it's good to see some stability: gimp is still there, and it's users continue to wish it's usability was better.

How about a bounty? I imagine there are a lot of people who would give money to whomever made it happen.

I will give $500 USD to whomever made it substantially more Photoshop-like. Would others do the same? Is there someone recognizeable and trustworthy to run this?

Although even I don't like some usability aspects of Gimp, keep in mind that many Gimp users do not want a Photoshop-like interface. We want Photoshop-like features, which are being worked on.

I see your point, but I've been using Gimp since around 1998. If they made it more Photoshop-like, though, I think I'd be lost. ;-)

It'd need more like $50,000 to even support a dev team to create a design plan. A bounty isn't going to work for something this significant.

As an occasional user of Photoshop and GIMP, I cannot recommend merely rearranging the deck chairs, which is what it would be to make GIMP more Photoshop-like. Photoshop's usability is not good, it's just very familiar for those who are familiar with it. If you plop someone in front of Photoshop for the first time, they are unequivocally lost. Even an expert photographer or old-school film retoucher are lost. There's a huge ecosystem of Photoshop training because of this, and the approaches and styles are highly varied.

Some tools are specialized and usability is a distraction. GIMP is extremely usable. That's what matters.

I'm sure we could crowd-source it. I know $500 isn't enough, but it's what would add to the pot.

I don’t know — even a project as old and complex like Blender manages to dedicate a entire release just to a major UI overhaul (and IMO a very good one).

UI should never be a ”someone xan fix it if they like to” issue. People are incredibly opinionated when it comes to UI changes and doing individual changes without a master plan seems like a good way to waste a lot of time just to end up with a convoluted mess that is inconsistent with itself.

The way Blender tackled is was IMO exceptional: very early on the entire discussion was lead by the community with mockups and serious involvement by all sides before any dev ever had to program a line. When they realized the scope grew bigger they asked sucessfully for donations specifically aimed at the new release.

I feel Gimp could use a concentrated effort like that and I’d certainly be willing to help when it gets going

Blender is quite a centralised project, which has lots of usage (and therefore support) in industry. Gimp isn't like that at all, it's miles away from being an industry standard.

The blog post highlights specifically usability improvements so they do pay attention to the usability.

Rather that state vague generic complaints, please be more constructive and be specific by highlighting the most important usability issues you encountered in your own experience and see if other users agree with your analysis by reporting it to the issue tracker.

This wasn't the place to list all my specific complaints, so I didn't

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues, however, is exactly the place ;-)

I think UX issues, without data backing them up, are just opinions for the most part. I don't feel very comfortable putting them in a bug tracker.

I wonder if they have UX trained people doing research and so on.

We don't have such people.

Opinions are fine. Gotta start somewhere.

I'll agree as long as you do not see Photoshop as the end goal for user friendliness :-P. Personally i have used Photoshop only a little and every time i used it i found it much harder than GIMP for the tasks i wanted it. I'd like it if GIMP became more user friendly but i'd really wouldn't want GIMP to become more like Photoshop as i do not see that program as user friendly.

(for reference, the image editor i see as the most user friendly is Paint Shop Pro, especially versions 5 to 7 - and note that i mean the most user friendly, not the most capable or robust)

Have not tried Paint Shop Pro since the 00's!! Maybe I'll try it again

Note that i mention, i haven't used any version above PSP7 (well, i have used 8 and 9 and i wasn't happy so i reverted to 7 and nowadays the use some onerous DRM so i do not even consider it). PSP7 works perfectly fine on Windows 10 though.

I personally found Corel Photopaint to be the most user friendly up until I stopped using it over a decade ago. I use Photoshop for work and sometimes Gimp but have never fully embraced either because the UI is so bad IMO.

I actually try to do as much as possible in Inkscape whose UI isn't perfect but the benefits of SVG make working with it a much more palpable.

Note that i refer specifically to PSP versions 5 to 7. In version 8 (or 9, i do not remember) they rewrote the UI which was much slower and had several issues (not only the UI but also some of the tools) and last i heard after it was bought by Corel (after PSP9) it became even worse.

I haven't used Photopaint myself so i can't judge.

*palatable

Normally I wouldn't get all grammar nazi on anyone but I figured you'd want to know :)

I still use PSP 5 to this day, its an amazing photo editor for 80% of the quick image editing tasks I do, and it is self contained in a folder so its natively a "portable" app.

I have a retail/boxed version of PSP7 and i really like how fast it opens. At some point i want to make my own "PSP clone" since i do not see any other image editor trying to use a similar UI (i think GraphicsGale is kinda inspired by it, but it is specialized to pixel art, not a generic image editor). But of course this is yet another thing for the "stuff i'd like to do" pile :-P.

My PSP5 is also the retail boxed version, one of my first few actual software purchases I made from way back. I'm also familiar with the "stuff I'd like to do pile" it sits next to the "games I have never played pile" both piles are quite large :)

>There's all these minor issues that get on your nerves

Have you tried reaching out to the developers in order to make your issues visible?

Sad reality is that nothing matters if the other side gives you PSD file. You're stuck with Photoshop.

Afaik PSD support has been improved significantly as of late.

Perhaps Affinity Photo is more your speed?

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