2.  What's New in GIMP?

Revision History
Revision $Revision: 1974 $ 2007-07-15 romanofski

GIMP 1.0 evolved gradually into the very stable and widely used 1.2 release. Three years later, as the GIMP development came closer to the next stable release, they decided that the level of fundamental change to the inner workings of the program justified calling the new stable version 2.0. GIMP 2.0.0 was released on March 23, 2004. For GIMP 2.2, the developers aimed at a short cycle, adding a number of important features that did not require instability-inducing low level changes. GIMP 2.2.0 was released on December 19, 2004. This section briefly describes the new features that were added in GIMP 2.2, as well as the features that were introduced in GIMP 2.0. If you are interested in the history of GIMP you are welcome to read Appendix A, GIMP History .

Here is a brief summary of some of the most important new features introduced in GIMP 2.2. There are many other smaller changes that long-time users will notice and appreciate (or complain about!). There are also important changes at the level of plug-in programming and script-fu creating that are not covered here.

2.1.  Interoperability and Standards Support

  • You can drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste image data from the GIMP to any application which supports image/png drops (currently Abiword and Kword at least) and image/xml+svg drops (Inkscape supports this one). So you can copy-and-paste curves into the GIMP from Inkscape, and then drag a selection into Abiword to include it inline in your document.

  • Patterns can now be any supported GtkPixbuf format, including png, jpeg, xbm and others.

  • GIMP can load gradients from SVG files, and palettes from ACT and RIFF files.

  • Drag-and-drop support has been extended. You can now drop files and URIs onto an image window, where they will be opened in the existing image as new layers.

    [Note] Note

    Please note, that Drag and Drop will not work for Apple Mac OS X between GIMP and the finder. This is due to a lack of functionality on Apples X11.app