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Comment by prokoudine | Hacker News Reader

2004: STOP TELLING ME I'M GOING TO LOSE MY LAYERS WHEN SAVING TO JPEG!

Also 2004: HOW DO I RECOVER LAYERS FROM JPEG?

2024: STOP TELLING ME YOU ONLY SAVE TO XCF AND I NEED TO EXPORT TO JPEG!

Also 2024: crickets

I'm not kidding you. That is exactly what I've been witnessing all these years. Project loss complaints went from daily routine to almost zero. But there's a price to pay.

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For decades, Adobe has presented a clear text message in the save dialog box and appends a removable _copy to the file name if the format lacks layers/transparency/alpha/animation/CMYK support/the appropriate bit depth, etc. but it doesn't impede professional users' progress when they know what they're doing. It also doesn't change the representation of the document in memory so you can just save a fully-layered version right afterwards unless you manually reload the file from disk.

That approach warns less knowledgeable or hurried users when it looks like they're aiming the gun at their foot, but it still lets expert users follow through unimpeded. Figuring out how to communicate the risk to the user while not removing functionality is proper interface design. Simply not letting people do it is "dumbing it down," and one of many examples of why Gimp is not an appropriate choice for high-volume professional users despite its on-paper feature list.

> But there's a price to pay.

And I resent the fact that I'm expected to pay that price when I'm not the one who was losing projects.

And as I said, carrying out the instruction but then telling me that I should be using Export instead would be acceptable. Refusing to carry out the instruction, even though the software has identified and understood the instruction just because I failed to say 'Simon Says' is not acceptable.

(Hi, by the way! I think you did some translations for PhotoPrint and CMYKTool some years back?)

Hi Alastair :)

Yes, I understand the frustration. The team didn't come up with anything better although maybe they could. I think another suggestion in this thread could very well be posted to GIMP's issue tracker.

Looks like they created a separate gimp-ux repository a few mos ago at least. I'd gladly contribute design work and code there if my experiences would be more collaborative and less painful than they were before I just gave up trying like a decade ago. In my experience, anyone making a design contribution could only do it in a discrete standalone PR-- with gimp's foundational lack of UI design, that's like someone that owns a crumbling dam saying they will only accept proposals to fix individual broken spots because the pieces that are still intact work just fine. The only real options were to make a fork and change it, or... go fork yourself-- and there was no way I was taking on all of that design and coding myself.

I think everyone will benefit from UX contributions.

Yeah, but trying to contribute design work to FOSS projects sucks— firstly, a whole lot of project maintainers think that UX and UI design hurt usability because they “dumb things down” to make them look pretty. Secondly, the workflows for code and design are completely different — you just can’t break design work down into a long series of modular pull requests like you can with code. I’ve encountered very few maintainers that don’t see that as a fundamental shortcoming of design and designers rather than a plug that needs a different adapter. Either way, you do a ton of upfront work for people that are suspicious of your motives and assume you’re incompetent, and it will either get totally ignored, or rejected out of hand. I’ve contributed somewhere on the order of 5 figures in coding hours to various FOSS projects and have a degree in design, and I still only contribute pure code features to FOSS projects.

I’m quite pleased to see that Gimp has undertaken this commendable step.

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