Why is GIMP still so bad?

I have been sort of an early adopter of GIMP, and in the past I was quite a heavy user for many years, and I never really understood all this bad press that GIMP gets, especially the UI. I used GIMP for many years, some months on daily basis, sometimes only few times a week, but quite regularly, and I always liked it, and never had problems with it. Then one day I had to edit several images on a computer that was not my and only had Photoshop on it, and I think I started to appreciate a little the frustration a long time Photoshop user with muscle memory must feel when using GIMP. The two hours of using Photoshop were some of the most frustrating in my life: everything kind of felt familiar, and I knew all those features that I want to use are there, but I had the hardest time finding them and figuring out how they worked. Everything seemed to be in the most illogical places, key combinations did not do what I expected them to do, dialogs did not make any sense. I managed to finish the work, but it took much longer time than it would in GIMP, and was incredibly frustrating. I am sure the Photoshop UI made perfect sense to the people who designed it, and that someone who is used to it can get great work done with it, but it made no sense to me. That's probably how Photoshop users feel when trying to get work done in GIMP.

These days I do not use GIMP much since I work almost exclusively with vector graphics, but every once a while I have some situation where GIMP seems to be the appropriate tool, and I always find it pleasant and easy to get back to.

Often times people say that GIMP is just another workflow and one has to get used to it, just like with Photoshop. Maybe there is some truth to that. But my personal opinion differs.

Of all the tools I played around with over the years, as a beginner or intermediate, be it Photoshop, Cinema 4D, Blender, Paint.Net, Illustrator, Inkscape, Premiere, and countless other less prolific..

I was always able to figure it out myself fairly easily, with a bit of tinkering... except GIMP. It is my least used program with the most Google and YouTube searches, and I'm never not frustrated while using it. Still, every few years I come back and try it again.. and am disappointed again.

I remember, to this day, what my very first frustration was. I wanted to use GIMP to resave a PNG as a JPG and didn't notice the hidden dropdown (behind a checkbox!?) to change the file type why saving. Changing it in the filename box returned an error.. why? why? Sure, it only took a minute to find it, but it shouldn't have.

Don't get me wrong, it is undoubtedly a powerful program and I am grateful that it exists. But the UI is abhorrently unintuitive.

I can't find it right now but I remember seeing a video at a dev conference, and a GIMP dev was taking questions.

A user asked if GIMP would be adding support for a feature. It was something related to printing, I wanna say either 32-bit color or CMYK. The GIMP dev spent the rest of their time trying to convince them that the feature was a bad thing and that they didn't want it or need it.

That mindset is why GIMP remains bad.

In my high school photography class ~12 years ago, everyone was using Photoshop. But I used GIMP instead. I remember everyone being so impressed - wow, there's this free tool that does pretty much everything Photoshop does?

But I feel like the software has barely changed since then. Photoshop has HEAPS of new features, and it's faster. And of course I don't expect GIMP to keep up with that. But even the basics, it feels just super slow and clunky. I wonder if they fully take advantage of the GPU?

Also yeah, as people have already mentioned, sometimes the UX is a bit confusing. Every time I use the alignment tool, I have to Google how to use it again. A lot of the tools are like that.

Has development slowed down over the past few years? I'm curious. Is there a lack of contributors? Or is the port to Gtk3 so overwhelmingly that it has taken up all their time/effort?

I have a suspicion that most of the people who are quick to react to any mention of GIMP with "Bad UI" aren't really those who see GIMP as a professional tool which could theoretically replace the proprietary one they work up to 8 hours a day.

If UI is reasonable and mostly logically laid out, the workflow can be adapted. However, if the available toolset and functionality are lacking, you just can't integrate the program into your daily work.

I'm very grateful for GIMP and Krita, but they are just not there. Sometimes, you even see the parts of the solution are available, but they don't compose, like in this Krita FR request, which is almost 5 years old by now:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381287

As someone who uses Photoshop since version 6 I think GIMP is totally capable as a software in what you can actually do with it.

Many grievances with GIMP stem from the way how things are done. Where Blender had a weird, but rationally thought out and consistent UX, GIMPs user interface feels weird and inconsistent — as if the way it ended up looking was the only way someone managed to get it to work using default GTK widgets.

This might seem like a luxury problem, but it is really not — an intuitive and consistent user interface is crucial in an image editor that most people fire up just to get stuff done. I'd even argue that is more important than a lot of other things.

Try out Krita as well, might be not as much geared towards photo editing, but has a much more consistent UX.

Because it is still compared to Photoshop. I like Paint.Net better as it is more like EA Deluxe Paint.

Good question, considering what Photopea achieved in a fraction of development time.

UX is incredibly complicated, and it is lacking in most open source projects.

It's needs designers who can tell developers what to build, and that level of specification just isn't present in most open-source which tends to be code-driven rather than design driven.

Something we need to do a better job of in the open-source community is educating people on what to expect from open-source software. GIMP isn't "a Photoshop clone". It's a unique thing. It's not trying to replace Photoshop. Unfortunately, 99% of the open-source community seems to believe that it is. How did we get to this point? When you see this BS, please call it out. Do your part.

> Why ?

Becouse it uses GNOME stuff ? GTK true abbrev don't mean anything for decades now.

Also Gimp is UNIVERSALLY hated by teens/kids who are forced to learn it in schools. Just finding anything in menu is so not intuitive (not like in Adobe/Corel) that is it plainly stupid. And that is not some high hanging fruit.

I just love when people demand everyone's muscle memory to be overturned in a free tool for "better UX" because they themselves are too lazy to learn a new workflow.

Krita made by artists, GIMP made by programmers.

Because Free Software people aren't supposed to care about quality, but rather be willing to suffer for freedom.

I think the X11 legacy has a lot to do with GIMP's UX even though there's now a native Mac version. That said, I still think GIMP is quite an achievement.

Ok, I'll be that guy who points out this question is simply yet another example of the Bulverism fallacy. Nothing to see here.

It's gotten far worse. None of the mouse events are working any longer in macOS. They done screwed it all up.