Free, open-source Photoshop alternative finally enters release candidate testing after 20 years — the transition from GIMP 2.x to GIMP 3.0 took two decades

Last Wednesday, the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, formerly General Image Manipulation Program) team finally announced that the long-awaited release of GIMP 3.0 is finally imminent— a release candidate version of GIMP 3.0 has arrived. This software version is close enough to finalization to be released to the community for testing and ironing out any final bugs.

Per the original blog post, "If user feedback reveals only small and easy to fix bugs, we will solve those problems and issue the result as GIMP 3.0. However, [...] If larger bugs and regressions are uncovered that require more substantial code changes, we may need to publish a second release candidate for further testing."

For those who have been using GIMP for a long while or have been aware of it, it may be a shock to hear that GIMP took this long to make it to 3.0. But as open source software and by far the most popular free image editing software available on the market, GIMP has had literal decades of iteration from dozens if not hundreds of open source software contributors.

Following the history of stable releases, GIMP has been on GIMP 2.0 or some iteration since 2004— then 2.4X from 2007, 2.6X in 2007, 2.8X in 2012, and has finally been on 2.10X from 2018 through to now, the final quarter of 2024. If all goes according to plan, the full stable release of GIMP will be GIMP 3.0 either by the end of this year or early 2025. Overall, the original version of GIMP lasted from '95 through 2003, marking 8 years for GIMP 1 and a whopping 20 years for GIMP 2.

So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets.

While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work.

Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects.