GIMP Photo Editor Gets More Bug Fixes Ahead of v3.2 Update

The GIMP team has officially released the third micro-release for its stable branch, GIMP 3.0.6. While the team is hard at work on the much-anticipated GIMP 3.2, this new stable release was "really needed" because of how many bug fixes have accumulated.

Micro-releases like this one are almost always focused on fixing bugs, and this time around, the GIMP team addressed some of the most commonly reported issues, which is fantastic news. Considering the jump to the GTK3 toolkit was a huge deal when GIMP 3.0 finally came out back in March , it's not surprising there were a few kinks to work out.

One of the biggest fixes that should improve your daily workflow is the annoying cursor issue with number sliders. If you've been using GIMP 3.0, you might have noticed the "Hand" cursor appearing when you hover over a number slider widget instead of the expected arrow cursor. Since the arrow cursor from GIMP 2.10 isn't available on all platforms, the developers had to figure out a new way to make it easier for you to see where you're clicking.

Another major problem that's now fixed is for Windows users who had their system set to specific languages, like Turkish or Norwegian Bokmål. Some users reported that GIMP would crash when they tried to open or export files. Apparently, this was a super tricky bug, traced all the way back to an issue in the Exiv2 metadata library, which was made even worse by a bug in Windows UCRT code. While a permanent fix is still in the works with Microsoft and the LLVM project, the GIMP team has added a temporary patch, so you should be able to keep using the software without those frustrating crashes.

If you've been using the Text tool, you might also have run into crashes when trying to change the color of text outlines. This is another issue that the GIMP team found and fixed in the development code, and now it's been backported for the GIMP 3.0.6 stable release.

There are also a lot of improvements under the hood that make a big difference in the way you edit. For one, GIMP now has better transparency handling with filters and transforms. In GIMP 2.10, certain special-casing made filters like "Color to Alpha" or rotating layers work "as expected" even on layers without transparency, but these were removed during the cleanup for GIMP 3.0. This removal led to some unexpected results when applying those filters, so the team created new, more generalized code to automatically add transparency when it's needed.

Mac users get some love in this update, too. The two main macOS contributors fixed a crash that would happen when dragging a color to fill the canvas. The team also fixed an issue where multiple icons would flash or appear in the macOS dock, and resolved a bug that made windows "flash" back and forth in multi-window mode. Also, on the build side of things, a bug that was preventing Python-based plug-ins from connecting to the internet on both Windows and macOS is finally fixed in the stable series.

There are a lot of updates in total, but those were the most important in my opinion. The overall takeaway is that GIMP 3.0.6 is focused on stability and bug elimination, with over 800 commits since the last release.

Source: GIMP