Gimp 2.8 Updated With More Features

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has been released with several new features and fixes. GIMP 2.8 features is equipped with several useful features including single-window mode which is probably one of the highly requested features and the latest v. 2.8.2 provides few more bug fixes and updates.

GIMP developers had released the stable release of GIMP back in May and GIMP release note states that the new release is a result of 3 years of collaborative inputs from the people all around the world.

Among all the improvements, the single window mode feature is one of the most awaited features. You can now toggle between the default multi-window mode and the new single-window mode through the Single-window mode checkbox in the Windows menu. In single-window mode, GIMP will put dockable dialogs and images in a single, tabbed image window.

There are several additions and improvements in user interface, tools and plugins. Likewise, several API has been refactored to ease the script development easier and better. Also, the GIMP license has been changed to (L)GPLv3+ from now onwards.

Similarly, several bugs have been fixed including the most notable ones such as not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw and not showing page setup options on Windows.

GIMP is available for download from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/. You can also choose any other mirror suitable for you.

The release note provides a information on installation of GIMP 2.8.

You can also install GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 using PPA. Fire up the terminal and just type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

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Batch Image Processing Using GIMP

I've previously enlisted few tools regarding batch image resizing in windows. However they are limited to windows only and I was searching for something which was cross-platform. With some search, I found that GIMP loaded with David's Batch Processor would let us resize the images easily.

DBP (David's Batch Processor) is a simple batch processing plugin for the Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files. Its main advantage is that the user does not have to learn a scripting language. Like the Gimp itself, DBP relies on a graphical interface. The user creates a list of images, and sets up the processing required for each image. The results of the current settings can be displayed. Once the required sequence of operations has been set up, DBP performs the same processing on each image in turn. The images can be colour corrected, resized, cropped, and sharpened, then renamed and saved to a different file in a specified image format.

Check official website for more information on installation and downloads.


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