GIMP Graphics Editor Celebrates 20 Years

On November 21, 1995, student Peter Mattis announced in three Usenet newsgroups the release of a beta version of the free GIMP General Image Manipulation Program with an “intuitive graphical interface for many graphical editing operations.”

In 1997, the decoding of the abbreviation GIMP was changed to the GNU Image Manipulation Program in order to comply with recursion.

This was the first such program under Linux. GIMP remains the best photo editor after two decades, even surpassing the market leader in proprietary software Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP was created as a thesis by two students at the University of California at Berkeley: the aforementioned Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. They have been working on the project since June, that is, five months.

After the public release, the program developed rapidly - it was used as a platform for testing various ideas, since GIMP already supported beta plugins in beta version. Thus, a huge number of plugins appeared for processing new file formats and applying effects.

In 2006-2012, the developers collaborated with Peter Sikking (Peter Sikking) to formulate the essence of the project and improve the interface. As a result, the GUI has become much more familiar to professionals, and various tools have become more powerful and easy to use.





In the past few years, there has been intense work on porting GIMP to the new GEGL engine, developers say . I had to rewrite or change almost the entire source code. Now the work is nearing completion.

To celebrate this anniversary a bit, the developers rolled out the GIMP 2.8.16 update with several improvements in support for OpenRaster, PSD files and the build automation system for OS X and various interface improvements.

Soon it is planned to release unstable versions 2.9.x, where they will run in the new GEGL engine and numerous new tools and functions. This will be the preparation for the release of GIMP 2.10 and the most significant update in the last three years. Then it is planned to finish the GTK + 3 port (it is needed to return support for Wacom tablets under Windows) and release GIMP 3.0.

In addition, the anniversary of the official website interface has been updated, permalinks appeared in the news and RSS / Atom feeds . The site now has a rubber design and a mobile version.

In general, the legendary GIMP lives and develops, with which millions of grateful users can congratulate their favorite program!