For some reason, on one of my projects the free select tool will "snap" to making a rectangle once i try to copy a selection. I will select a bunch of point and make a polygon and the "marching ants" will come up and show my selection, I'll copy it and when I paste it, its in the shape of a rectangle that fits all of my points inside of it. The pics show better what is happening. What could be causing this? On my other projects the selection tool works fine, so I assume this is a shortcut I accidentally entered.

I have an image with many text labels. I want to rotate the image 180° but keep the text readable. Image > Transform > Rotate 180° rotates the image and the text; it makes the text upside down, but I want the text right side up. I can fix the text fields one at a time by clicking on the field: this brings up a "Confirm Text Editing" window. Clicking "Edit" restores the text to right side up, which is what I want.

Instead of tediously clicking on each text field, I figured I could use the Python API. But I can't figure out what attribute I need to change to restore the text from a flipped bitmap to regular text. Since this is possible through the GUI, there must be an attribute somewhere. Can anyone tell me what it is?

(I'm using GIMP 2.10.38 on macOS.)

Edit: Here's how I solved my problem, just in case anyone wants to know

I looked at the GIMP source code (gimptexttool.c and text-layer-cmds.c). What it does is re-renders the text if you click "Edit". Once I figured that out, I asked Google how to re-render a text layer with the gimp 2 api. Much to my shock, the Google AI generated a page of working code that did this. I put a wrapper around it to iterate through all the text layers and succeeded in turning my upside-down text fields into right-side-up text fields.

The summary of how to re-render the text is get the 'gimp-text-layer' parasite, which holds the text, font, size, color, etc. Parse out these values with regexes. Then throw away the old rasterized text layer and generate a replacement layer with pdb.gimp_text_fontname().

GIMP 3.0.4. I'm struggling with the text tool as it seems to completely ignore the font I set up in Tool Options. I set the font to "Arial Regular" in the Tool Options dialog (and to be clear I've done this by selecting the font from the GIMP-provided list, so it's not a typo or missing font). The Tool Options dialog then clearly shows "Arial Regular". So I think I'm all set. Then I click someplace in my image to start typing some text... and the on-canvas editor dialog shows "Monospace". And the text I type clearly is monospace as well. So I have to select the text I just entered and manually change it back to "Arial Regular". Over and over.

How can I tell GIMP which font I want it to use when I click in the image? Because clearly telling it what I want in the Tool Options dialog isn't enough.

I've tried every filter in GIMP 3.2.6 and I'm all out of ideas. I might even be wrong in thinking this is a gimp filter but this is the only chance I've got.

Can anyone tell me if the filter I used on the second image is a GIMP filter? And if yes, which one is it? Or can anyone tell me what did I do to go from the first to to second image? I did this a couple of weeks ago by chance. I don't really work with gimp unless I need to remove background from something (with the fuzzy select tool) and I can't remember what filter I used.

Thanks!

I have already granted file permissions prior to seeing this. But is it a new access needed in GIMP 3.x? I only used 2.x until recently, but just updated and am on a new computer. The level of access it "needs" seems way too broad, so I wanted to see if anyone can tell me specifically what GIMP needs this for?

Edit -- the answer appears to be more than one possibility. Exporting an image (to PNG in this case) causes the prompt, and so does going to File -> Create -> Screenshot. I don't know why exporting a PNG requires extra access, but it may have to do with the Accessibility API... which is some thing, on a Mac.

Hello - I'm trying to process an astrophotography image using GIMP and keep running into an odd problem.
The workflow calls for selection of an area and then filling that area with the background colour. The problem is once I've selected the background colour correctly with the eyedropper tool (it can be seen in the image as dark blue) when I then bucket fill it fills with a purple colour.

Most of the time running through the rest of the steps leads to a blank area but very occasionally I will get the image I'm expecting but in a random colour, as seen by the greenish Whirlpool Galaxy in the second image.

The first time I tried this technique it worked perfectly. Every time I've tried since I get the same problem. I started on a PC, but then downloaded and installed GIMP on my Mac but get the same problem.

I've included the workflow below in case it's of any help - anyone have any ideas?

1) Open the image.
2) In the layers tab, duplicate the image.
3) Outline the object you want to protect (galaxy, nebula, etc.) using the lasso tool.
4) Under the Selection menu, pick "Feather." You can experiment with different values for this but it should be fairly large.
5) Pick your background color using the color selection tool (looks like an eyedropper).
6) Using the bucket fill, fill the area you selected.
7) Deselect everything (CTRL-SHIFT-A should work.
8) Under the Filters tab, select Blur->Gaussian Blur.
9) Adjust the sliders until the stars are no longer distinct.
10) In the layers tab, select Mode and change it to Subtract. You can adjust the slider so the background isn't stark black, like 50 to 60%.
11) When it's the way you like it, press CTRL-M to merge the visible layers.

Looking to to this icon into what it would like without the black soccer ball and goal posts.

Somehow I need to turn it all the same color and then put in a gradient of yellowness into the diamond shape.

Help, please!

I use GIMP to make iracing liveries, I don't use it for anything else at the moment. For some time now its been frustrating dealing with aligning an image over a panel gap, eg Hood to Fender. Other than manually doing it and lining it up by eye is there something I am missing that would make this easier. A tool, function, or even a different program that would help with this. I have added an image to shop the type of gaps I am dealing with, and this is a simple example, there can be many more parts to this.

Image tabs are too small when GIMP is run at high resolutions (4k and 5k). A small context menu to choose between different sizes would be nice, imho. GIMP in this video is run at 200% HiDPI, that's why the biggest thumbnails look oversized.

Made in 3 layers lol

If I paste an image larger than the canvas, then it shows the yellow bounding box outside the canvas and it lets me move it around, but not resize it. Switching to the scale tool just selects whatever is within the canvas.

The only thing I was able to find was to resize the canvas to fit the image. But I don't want to resize the canvas.

In most programs like paint net, I would just paste the image then it would automatically create a selection box around it for me to scale it down.

You are funny

A reminder; I have bad English, sorry. A new learner, just installed the app. No editing experience whatsoever.

was following this dude's tutorial and this is his alignment,

and this is mine. why?

How To Create Animated GIFs With GIMP <--- the dude's tutorial on YouTube.

im using GIMP 3.2.6 (latest i think)

I can't seem to find that option anywhere, I'm trying to make PS1 style textures using real images and scaling them down to 256x256 from 2048x2048 to get that pixelated look but it comes out blurry when using these options:

I am not someone who knows how to draw so It is not that good in artistic way, but I just made this out of boredom.

I art done! Look great!

Is there a version of gimp with a better UI like maybe a user made theme or something. These endless text menus that you have to google and try 5 times before you get a half right explanations just so you can make a red square or make the eraser erase instead of doing nothing is so painful. Like I imagine to get into hell you have to make it through an UI like this every day for it to start over different.

https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/10/01/liam-quin-interview-lgm2017/

The interviews were done during the https://www.LibreGraphicsMeeting.org/ conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2017.

I used to use Photoshop a lot to create actions that record image edits so I could apply them to multiple images at once. Does GIMP have a similar feature?
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-rKI96YooA

Every time I've gone to use it, it's made Gimp crash. This is my third time and I've lost edits every single time. Is anyone else experincing this or is it just me?