The 2.8 series of GIMP is the version that should be used for production. Its latest version 2.8.20 brings some bug fixes such as a more robust color picker and a more stable Windows installer that uses less memory. More detailed changes can be read below. We’ve added the latest version to our download section already which can be found here.

A little more interesting is the question when GIMP 2.10 could be released. There is no official word on this – some months ago there was a little hint that it could be at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2017 in Singapore but since it is already in March this seems to be a little too close to fix all the open things that block the next release. Nevertheless there was an interesting posting at gimp.org regarding the 2.10 blockers:

~60 bugs need to be taken care of. Some of them are hard blcokers, some can be postponed.

libgimp needs to get some deprecations

GIMPs new linear workflow needs more adjustements with the Curves and Levels tool

GIMPs 2.9 has new layer modes. The backwards compatibility for GIMP 2.8 needs to be taken more care of

The newly introduced flat icon design as well as the dark base theme need a dedicated designer for the finishing. Otherwise it can’t be shipped with GIMP 2.10

All GEGL filters need to be color managed with GIMPs new color management engine

The new Warp Transform tool is working well on small images, but it is still laggy on larger images.

The complete news with more details on these steps can be found on the official GIMP website.

The current in-developement versions can be downloaded in our downloads section

These are the changes from GIMP 2.8.18 to GIMP 2.8.20

Core:

Avoid D-Bus error message when built without D-Bus support * fix OS X min required conditional in gimpimagewindow.c * Saving to existing .xcf.bz and .xcf.gz files didn’t truncate them and could lead to unnecessarily large files * Text layer created by gimp-text-fontname doesn’t respect border when resized

Avoid seeking when saving XCF files to prevent corruption with file network shares (fixed since 2014, but not mentioned in NEWS yet)

GUI:

Flow on Paint Dynamics editor dialog: the ‘y’ axis is indicating ‘Rate’ instead ‘Flow’

Vertical ruler shows artifacts if the status bar isn’t showing * Tablet stylus misbehaves when crossing the edge of a dock in multi-window-mode

Disable the new “automatic window tabbing” feature introduced on macOS Sierra

Improve the visibility of slider handles with dark themes * Make it harder to switch to renaming if selecting already selected items in resource lists

Tools:

Make toggling to color picker mode of paint tools more robust

Libgimp:

Call gimp_file_entry_set_filename() with filename encoding

Windows Installer:

Reduce the memory requirement when running the installer (has already been shipped in a 2.8.18 installer-only update) * Ship an updated libcairo to fix GTK+ UI rendering problems, like missing palette border/bevel and shadows under tab labels

macOS DMG:

Ship the Tango icon theme with the DMG for a complete set of icons * Fix the way mime data is copied into the bundle * No longer copy Pango modules into the bundle * Prevent a crash caused by drag&drop on OSX by patching the included GTK+

for a complete set of icons * Fix the way mime data is copied into the bundle * No longer copy Pango modules into the bundle * Prevent a crash caused by drag&drop on by patching the included GTK+ Ship a patch for gettext to make sure the preferred UI language will be used

Plug-ins:

Prevent the Python console from closing by the Escape key * Help browser does not launch on OS X * Filter ‘Edge Detect/Difference of Gaussians’ returns empty image * Only use -xobjective-c for compile commands * mkgen.pl: fix calls to write_file() routine to write to current directory

When printing, the images are composed onto a white background to prevent printing a black box instead of a transparent image * Fix color vision deficiency display filters to apply gamma correction directly

Updated Translations:

Catalan * Czech

Danish

Finnish

French

German

Greek

Hungarian

Icelandic

Italian

Polish

Portuguese

Slovak

Slovenian

Scottish Gaelic

Spanish

Swedish

General:

Bug fixes

Contributors:

Akkana Peck, Ingo Brückl, Jehan, Jernej Simončič, Kristian Rietveld, Massimo Valentini, Michael Natterer, Michael Schumacher, Thomas Manni

Download

Current 2.8.20 downloads for all systems can be found in our downloads section