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We are happy to announce the third micro-releaseGIMP 3.0.6.During our development ofGIMP 3.2 we’ve found and fixed a number of bugs and regressions.We have backported many of those bugfixes to this stable release, so you don’t have to waitfor the upcoming 3.2 release candidate to receive them!
Micro releases like 3.0.6 are focused onfixing bugs and regressions.Many of these have already been announced in our3.1.2 and3.1.4 news posts. However, we wanted to highlightsome of the most commonly reported issues so that you are aware of the fixes.
To quote from our 3.1.4 news post:
As part of the port toGTK3,the default cursors were updated.This change led to some users experiencing the dreaded “Hand” cursor when hovering over a number slider widget. Unfortunately,the arrow cursor fromGIMP 2.10 is not included on all platforms so we had to devise an alternate method.Denis Rangelov andMichal Vašut helped us find an initial solution while we continue to work on the design. We hope the current solution willmake it easier for you to see where you’re clicking!
SinceGIMP 3.0, we have received reports from some users thatGIMP crashed for them upon opening or exporting files.We were unable to replicate the problem, until developers likeJacob Boerema andBruno Lopes noticed a pattern -the affected users all had specific system languages like Turkish or Norwegian Bokmål. They traced the bug to our metadatalibrary,Exiv2.
With the help of an Exiv2 maintainerKevin Backhouse, we eventuallyfound that the problem was caused by a bug inLLVM’s libc++, furthermade worse by a bug in WindowsUCRT code! We have filed a report withMicrosoft whileLuca Bacci has contributed a patch toLLVM project,not merged yet. While waiting for the issues to be resolved at thesource,Bruno has added a temporary patch to our Exiv2 buildproposed byKevin in order to workaround the issue.If you continue to have trouble with this bug, please let us know!
A number of users have reported crashes when trying to change the color of text outlines via the Text tool. This problem wasdiscovered and fixed in our 3.1 development code, and is now fixed in 3.0.6 as well.
Certain image formats such asJPEG do not support transparency.GIMP respects those limitations when importing images, and doesnot automatically add transparency when opening them (unless you change this setting in Preferences). While this is importantfor advanced users, it can be confusing for people who are unfamiliar with image formats.
InGIMP 2.10, some special-casing was done to make certain filters and transforms work “as expected” even if the layer did nothave transparency. These were removed during the code clean-up done duringGIMP 3.0’s development, and unfortunately not restoredbefore release. As a result, some users had reported odd results when applyingColor to Alpha or rotating layers withouttransparency. Since then, we have developed more generalized code to automatically add transparency to layers when necessary, whichshould prevent those problems for unsuspecting users!
Due to how interconnected it was with other code changes, we back-ported a new feature fromGIMP 3.1.2 - the ability touse theme colors for the brush, font, and palette dockables! You can read more about it in ouroriginal news poston the feature.
During the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting, our co-maintainerMichael Natterer spent a good deal of time reviewing, cleaning, andupdating our non-destructive (NDE) filter code. These improvements have been backported toGIMP 3.0.6 to improve the stability of ourfilters, and to align the development and stable codebases so we can more easily resolve any remaining issues.Jehan made furtherperformance improvements and clarified in the interface when filters can and can not be applied non-destructively.The code to applyNDE filters to channels was also backported.
We fixed a bug related to importing Adobe Color Book (.acb) palettesCMYK andLAB palettes. We also updated our Palette Importdialogue to let you filter the view by the different palette formats thatGIMP currently supports (including AdobeASE, standardCSS,andGIMP’s ownGPL format).
Again, to quote from our 3.1.4 news post:
New contributorCorentin Noël developed a fix for the Image Settings tab not appearing when printing in sandboxed applicationslike flatpak or snap. Due to restrictions, the tab will be created as a secondary dialogue instead - allowing you to edit thosesettings once again. This patch is a more future-proof version of anearlier attempt byBZZZZ creatively bypassing the sandbox portal.We appreciate the work of both contributors to fix this problem! This proposed solution is not ideal,UX-wise, compared to the originaltab, but it is necessary because the portal print dialog is hardly usable without these settings.
Our two main macOS contributorsLukas Oberhuber andGabriele Barbero have worked to fix some important issues withour macOS build. One example of their efforts is fixing a crash when dragging a color to fill the canvas. This was caused byour new color management code being more strictly checked by macOS compared to Linux and Windows - we have switched to a customapplication/x-geglcolor mimetype to prevent this issue on all our platforms. They also improved issues with multipleicons appearing in the macOS dock (such as when running a plug-in or script). For multi-window mode users, they also fixed abug where the windows would “flash” back and forth a number of times.
If you are a macOS developer and are interested in helping triage moremacOS issues,we’d appreciate your support!
During development, we received reports from theZero Day Initiative of potential securityissues with some of our file import plug-ins. While these issues are very unlikely to occur with real files, developers likeJacob Boerema andAlx Sa proactively improved security for those imports.
The resolved reports are:
Jehan andBruno backported all the build-related commits from the 3.1 development branch. For example,the niceautomatic associations generation.Additionally, a bug that made it impossible for Python-based plug-ins to connect to the Internet on Windowsand macOS is now fixed on the stable series.
AppImage users will also have a more reliable package from now on. ThePS/EPS plug-in was restored towork on AppImage. Also,Bruno worked to make the AppImage based on Debian 13trixie, whichfixed many bugs at once,such as crashing at the file dialog when there is a .json file, some PyGObject limitations,incorrect colored subpixel rendering by Cairo and crashes when exportingJPEG 2000 images.
Similarly, the Flatpak manifest was updated to use the latestGNOME 49 runtime.So Flatpak users, you may remove the previous org.gimp.GIMP.HEIC extension if it isstill installed, sinceGIMP now usesorg.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra instead.
Jehan,lillolollo, andJacob Boerema have worked to remove a number of warnings produced when buildingGIMP.While most of these were harmless, it is good to get rid of them in order to have cleaner code and build output.
There are a variety of smaller fixes in this release as well. While we can’t exhaustively cover 600+ code updates (!),here are a few more of interest.
Exif.Image.DateTime and fixing how comments are synchronized with the image when exported.Øyvind Kolås has released new updates tobabl andGEGL, the underlying color management engines forGIMP.
GEGL 0.4.64 contains a number of updates and fixes.Ondřej Míchal added OpenCL to the baseGeglOperationPointComposer3class, which means more filters can now support acceleration using theGPU. He andØyvind Kolås also worked on making thefilter testing process more robust.Jacob Boerema fixed theZDI-CAN-27803 vulnerability forRGBE image imports. An updatewas made to thegegl:mirrors filter to redraw correctly on large images (this improvesGIMP’s Kaleidoscope filter).Bruno Lopes andJehan contributed many build process improvements and clean-up.
babl 0.1.116 brings a number of build process updates and script clean-ups byBruno Lopes.You can also now check the version of babl in the commandline with a--v flag thanks toJoe Da Silva.
SinceGIMP 3.0.4, in the mainGIMP repository:
38 people contributed changes or fixes toGIMP 3.0.6 codebase (orderis determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):
Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined bynumber of commits):
gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 10 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber.Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, reportbugs and discuss possible improvements with us.Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage ourvariousdiscussion channels or socialnetwork accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!
Note: considering the number of parts inGIMP and around, and how weget statistics throughgit scripting, errors may slip inside thesestats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized somecontributors or contributions.
Our GSoC 2025 studentsGabriele Barbero andOndřej Míchal have been added to theCore Team in our GitLab repository! This is in response to the excellent work they havedone over the summer and continued to contribute afterwards.
Since the 3.0.4 news post, a new mirror have been contributed:
Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads.Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access toGIMP.
You will find all our official builds onGIMP official website (gimp.org):
Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc).
While the bulk of the work is ongoing on the main development branch(for upcomingGIMP 3.2), we felt this new stable 3.0 release was reallyneeded, as more bug fixes accumulated. We highly recommend to updateGIMP to this latest version for production work.
In the meantime, for more adventurous creators, curious people, and inparticular anyone who would like to be a part in the creation of abetter creative software, we also encourage you to try out ourGIMP3.1.4 development version(experimental release for the futureGIMP 3.2) and reportbugs or suggestUserExperience improvements.
GIMP is first and foremost a Community, Free Software. What happens init is what we all make of it. By contributing, you make it yoursoftware! 🤗
In any case, our accelerated release schedule seems to be going prettywell so far, and we are pretty happy of howGIMP 3.2 is taking shape!
Don’t forget you candonate and personally fundGIMP developers, as a way togive back and accelerate the development ofGIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!