Gimp trouble

Phylly

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Having trouble with my Gimp application -- when originally downloaded to my laptop I could use any tool I wanted, and was in the process of learning them all when I started having trouble. I can crop, rotate, align, move, scale image, and zoom, but that's about all -- I cannot use anything to do with color whether picking, filling, erasing, airbrush, and several others, and I used to be able to add/edit text, but that just recently stopped working. It has now become for me what one other member was looking for -- a simple program to crop/cut an image. Have tried downloading the newest version of the time when Gimp quit working, but that didn't help either; finally had to give up and install and use MyPaint for the parts I could no longer use in Gimp. But MyPaint doesn't let me do everything Gimp did. Please help me get back my Gimp.
 


From looking at your other threads, I can see that you are running Mint.

I've never seen any problems like this with Gimp. But offhand, I can think of a few things to try:
1. Reset the preferences to their defaults.
In gimp open the preferences dialog from the following menu item:
edit->preferences
And then click the reset button. That should set all of Gimps defaults back to their original settings.

If that doesn't fix the issue:
2. Remove the hidden directory in your home directory which contains your personal settings for gimp.

The directory should be called .gimp-2.8
You can either open your file-browser and delete it, or open a terminal and use the command:
Code:
rm .gimp-2.8 -r
NOTE: Be very careful with the above rm command. I recommend copy/pasting it, so you don't accidentally get the wrong path. For example, if you accidentally put a space between '.' and 'gimp-2.8', you would end up recursively deleting everthing in your home folder. Which would not be good!

Once the hidden settings directory has been removed, the next time you start Gimp, it will re-create the directory with default settings again.

If that still doesn't work:
3. Completely uninstall and re-install Gimp
Open a terminal and completely uninstall gimp using the following command:
Code:
sudo apt remove --purge gimp\*
That will remove ALL installed packages for Gimp and remove ALL configurations/settings for Gimp.
NOTE: the expression "gimp\*" tells apt to remove all packages whose names begin with "gimp".
But be very careful when typing the above. Again, I recommend copy/pasting the command.
If you accidentally put a space between 'gimp' and '\*' - the expression takes on a completely different, disasterous meaning. "gimp" tells apt to uninstall the main gimp package and then "\*" tells apt to uninstall all packages on the system. Which would not be good!
So there is no space. It is "gimp\*" NOT "gimp \*"!

Additional:
You could simply use something like the "software centre", or whatever it is called this week to uninstall/reinstall gimp, but the configuration files may end up being left behind. So opening a terminal and using "apt remove" with the "--purge" option ensures that we get a clean uninstall and guarantees that all config files will be removed.

Getting back on track:
Once you have SAFELY removed Gimp, you can reinstall it and any plugins/extras that were removed during the uninstall step.
e.g.
Code:
sudo apt install gimp gimp-data gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry gimp-gmic gimp-help-common gimp-help-en

The above command installs gimp, plus a few extra packages that I'd personally recommend - including extra brushes/presets, GMIC (which has a ton of additional image effects), the plugin registry (which has even more effects) and the help/documentation package.
If you aren't a native english speaker, then you might want to install the help package for your system locale instead of the english one.

There are several other extra packages available for Gimp for things like additional printing support, creating textures, working with RAW image formats, correcting lens distortion, animation etc.

You can see a list of all gimp-related packages by running the following command:
Code:
 apt search gimp --names-only
If you do want any further plugins, you can install them using apt install, as per previous examples.

To wrap things up: I strongly suspect that resetting the preferences or deleting the hidden directory containing the preferences will probably fix the issue.

But if completely uninstalling and re-installing Gimp doesn't fix the issue, I'm afraid I'm completely out of ideas!
 
Last edited:
From looking at your other threads, I can see that you are running Mint.

I've never seen any problems like this with Gimp. But offhand, I can think of a few things to try:
1. Reset the preferences to their defaults.
In gimp open the preferences dialog from the following menu item:
edit->preferences
And then click the reset button. That should set all of Gimps defaults back to their original settings.

If that doesn't fix the issue:
2. Remove the hidden directory in your home directory which contains your personal settings for gimp.

The directory should be called .gimp-2.8
You can either open your file-browser and delete it, or open a terminal and use the command:
Code:
rm .gimp-2.8 -r
NOTE: Be very careful with the above rm command. I recommend copy/pasting it, so you don't accidentally get the wrong path. For example, if you accidentally put a space between '.' and 'gimp-2.8', you would end up recursively deleting everthing in your home folder. Which would not be good!

Once the hidden settings directory has been removed, the next time you start Gimp, it will re-create the directory with default settings again.

If that still doesn't work:
3. Completely uninstall and re-install Gimp
Open a terminal and completely uninstall gimp using the following command:
Code:
sudo apt remove --purge gimp\*
That will remove ALL installed packages for Gimp and remove ALL configurations/settings for Gimp.
NOTE: the expression "gimp\*" tells apt to remove all packages whose names begin with "gimp".
But be very careful when typing the above. Again, I recommend copy/pasting the command.
If you accidentally put a space between 'gimp' and '\*' - the expression takes on a completely different, disasterous meaning. "gimp" tells apt to uninstall the main gimp package and then "\*" tells apt to uninstall all packages on the system. Which would not be good!
So there is no space. It is "gimp\*" NOT "gimp \*"!

Additional:
You could simply use something like the "software centre", or whatever it is called this week to uninstall/reinstall gimp, but the configuration files may end up being left behind. So opening a terminal and using "apt remove" with the "--purge" option ensures that we get a clean uninstall and guarantees that all config files will be removed.

Getting back on track:
Once you have SAFELY removed Gimp, you can reinstall it and any plugins/extras that were removed during the uninstall step.
e.g.
Code:
sudo apt install gimp gimp-data gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-repository gimp-gmic gimp-help-common gimp-help-en

The above command installs gimp, plus a few extra packages that I'd personally recommend - including extra brushes/presets, GMIC (which has a ton of additional image effects), the plugin registry (which has even more effects) and the help/documentation package.
If you aren't a native english speaker, then you might want to install the help package for your system locale instead of the english one.

There are several other extra packages available for Gimp for things like additional printing support, creating textures, working with RAW image formats, correcting lens distortion, animation etc.

You can see a list of all gimp-related packages by running the following command:
Code:
 apt search gimp --names-only
If you do want any further plugins, you can install them using apt install, as per previous examples.

To wrap things up: I strongly suspect that resetting the preferences or deleting the hidden directory containing the preferences will probably fix the issue.

But if completely uninstalling and re-installing Gimp doesn't fix the issue, I'm afraid I'm completely out of ideas!
Okay. Reset Preferences and that did no good, so entered command into terminal, then restarted. That gave me back the eraser, and text. But could not "pick a color", and a couple others I tried, so I guess I'll have to go with the uninstall/reinstall.
 
Okay. Reset Preferences and that did no good, so entered command into terminal, then restarted. That gave me back the eraser, and text. But could not "pick a color", and a couple others I tried, so I guess I'll have to go with the uninstall/reinstall.
Okay, have uninstalled Gimp, and tried to reinstall by copy/paste in terminal, but I got the message:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package gimp-plugin-repository
phylly@phylly-Latitude-D830 ~ $

What do I do now?
 
Sorry! That should have been gimp-plugin-registry NOT gimp-plugin-repository!
I think my phone must have autocorrected the word registry to repository.......
:/ I didn't notice that when I posted. I corrected a few other mistakes and somehow missed that one.

I've just re-edited my original post and corrected the mistake.... Sorry about that!
To save you having to scroll back up to find it - here it is again (but correct this time):
Code:
sudo apt install gimp gimp-data gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry gimp-gmic gimp-help-common gimp-help-en

:/
 
Sorry! That should have been gimp-plugin-registry NOT gimp-plugin-repository!
I think my phone must have autocorrected the word registry to repository.......
:/ I didn't notice that when I posted. I corrected a few other mistakes and somehow missed that one.

I've just re-edited my original post and corrected the mistake.... Sorry about that!
To save you having to scroll back up to find it - here it is again (but correct this time):
Code:
sudo apt install gimp gimp-data gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry gimp-gmic gimp-help-common gimp-help-en

:/

No worries. Things are begining to come together and that's what matters. Thanks for getting back.
 
Last edited:
Okay, I have upgraded my Linux to 17.3 Rosa (verified it on my Welcome Screen), used your corrected code in terminal and downloaded, and did restart, and got Gimp going again, at least to a degree (eraser and pencil/paintbrush) will only work on a freshly opened .jpg, not a saved .xcf, but at least that's better than what I had before -- jumping back and forth between Gimp and MyPaint.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm, this is very strange..... I don't understand why certain tools are working and others aren't... It doesn't make sense.... Gimp is a solid program. Clearing out the settings should have sorted the problem out if it was settings related.... So it seems that we can rule out settings.

How experienced are you with using Gimp? Do you know how to use layers and such-the-like?
Offhand, the only other thing I can think of is perhaps if this has something to do with the selection area. Either there is no area selected for the tools to act upon, or you have a different layer selected perhaps. Kinda hard to explain.

I think for now, I'll just have a quick play with Gimp and see if I can come up with some screenshots or a video or something to try to explain what I mean.
 
Here we go - here's a .xcf file I've just loaded into gimp. A banner used to advertise my bands new EP.
I've just taken a screenshot of it:
2017-10-07@01-20-08_1366x768.png



And here it is again with some hopefully helpful annotations: :/
gimphelp.png


You may need to zoom into the image a bit to see the dashed line.
In the above image, if we were to select one of the tools, it would only have an effect inside the dashed area on the left (where the band logo is) - I've added a semi-transparent white overlay just inside the area. That is the only area where we can paint. Tools like paintbrush, pencil, airbrush, text, eraser etc will NOT work outside of that area.

So what I'm saying is: You can only use tools on the selected layer and in the selected area.
Also, for some of the tools, you must have a brush shape selected, you might also want to check the alpha/transparency values of the brushes and the size etc.

Also layering is important. If we had the bottom layer of the image selected and we tried scribbling over the album artwork on the right with the paint-brush tool - Our scribbles will not appear over the album artwork, because the artwork is on the top layer. Instead the scribbles will be on the bottom layer - hidden by the layers above it!

So here's the image, with the bottom layer selected and we've just scribbled over the artwork on the right:
2017-10-07@02-23-51_1366x768.png


Doesn't look any different does it?
But if we hide the top two layers:
2017-10-07@02-26-51_1366x768.png

Lo and behold - there are our childish scribbles.
And if we display all of the layers and move the bottom layer to the top:
2017-10-07@02-32-17_1366x768.png

Now that we've displayed all of the layers AND moved the bottom layer to the top - we can see our scribble!

Now - for all I know, you could be a Gimp pro - So you may well know all of these things very well. But I'm just trying to come up with some rational, feasible, usage scenarios that might make it look as if Gimp is not working properly.

I'm thinking perhaps, after you have loaded your .xcf file you are either attempting to draw outside of the boundaries of the current selection, or the current layer (in which case - look for the dotted black and white border), or you are manipulating a hidden/obscured layer (in which case check the layers window to see which layer is selected). Or something? IDK...

It would certainly explain why paint tools are working over newly opened bitmap images, but not on xcf files.
With bitmap and jpeg images, there is only the one layer containing the image data and that layer is the size of the entire image.
Whereas in Gimp, there are lots of layers and they are not always guaranteed to be the same size as the image. When you add a text item, Gimp puts the text on a new layer. Text layers are floating layers that are normally just a tiny bit larger than the text they contain.

Which is a point - if you have a text layer selected when you load your xcf, you will be unable to draw/paint using any of the tools either. In which case, you'd need to select another, non-text/non-floating layer before trying to draw.


Hope this helps....
 
Last edited:
Hmmm, this is very strange..... I don't understand why certain tools are working and others aren't... It doesn't make sense.... Gimp is a solid program. Clearing out the settings should have sorted the problem out if it was settings related.... So it seems that we can rule out settings.

How experienced are you with using Gimp? Do you know how to use layers and such-the-like?
Offhand, the only other thing I can think of is perhaps if this has something to do with the selection area. Either there is no area selected for the tools to act upon, or you have a different layer selected perhaps. Kinda hard to explain.

I think for now, I'll just have a quick play with Gimp and see if I can come up with some screenshots or a video or something to try to explain what I mean.

Not very experienced with Gimp at all. Everything I do in Gimp is relatively simple, like cleaning up a scanned document or picture, usually, so I've never had to work with layers. Mostly I cut, paste, crop, remove dirty or bad spots, put back words or letters missing in my damaged original, and so on. Also, I've never been able to find a manual for using Gimp, just the Linux manual which talks about the very basic usages in Gimp, not the more elaborate or complex ones like layers or even some of the tools in the toolbar.
 
Hi all, hi @Phylly

On GIMP, I am very much likewise, but often use it to scale images and export jpegs as .png, to upload them to sites such as this.

A Google search under keywords "linux gimp guide" revealed, amongst other possibilities, this one

http://10steps.sg/tutorials/20-fantastic-gimp-tutorials-beginner-to-pro/

... and if you have not already seen it, nor learned those skills, it might assist? I have bookmarked it for myself.

Cheers

Wizard
@JasKinasis - really liked #9 mate, and a cool way to work into it the band :rolleyes:
 
@JasKinasis - really liked #9 mate, and a cool way to work into it the band :rolleyes:
@wizardfromoz
Heh heh - It wasn't my intention to use the thread to promote my band. Pretty much all of my .xcf files are band-related. Any time I need to create a poster design, or create a banner image for the bands website or FB page, I do it in Gimp.

That particular image was the most recent .xcf file I'd worked on and it seemed to be a pretty good one to use to demonstrate/explain why certain tools might not be working!

@Phylly - If you installed the gimp-help packages, then you should have access to Gimps documentation via the "help" menu in Gimp.
It's worth taking a look at. It contains tips and tutorials for every aspect of Gimp. From basic usage, right through to more advanced things like scripting and extending Gimp.

Gimps documentation is also available to view online. The content is exactly the same as the offline documentation. The link to gimps online help/documentation (in English) is:
https://docs.gimp.org/en/

Gimps built-in (and/or online) documentation and the tutorials in the link posted by Wiz should provide a good head-start!

And if you want to learn how to use Gimp fully - to a professional level - I highly recommend the second edition of "Beginning Gimp: From Novice to Professional" by Akkana Peck - published by Apress.

It's an excellent book which thoroughly teaches every aspect of Gimp, in much more detail than Gimps documentation. Images in the book can also be downloaded from the publishers website, so you can follow along with each of the examples/activities described in the book.

I invested in a copy a number of years ago and it's really helped me to improve my skills with Gimp. It's also been an invaluable reference when I've inevitably forgotten how to do something in Gimp!
 
Hi all, hi @Phylly

On GIMP, I am very much likewise, but often use it to scale images and export jpegs as .png, to upload them to sites such as this.

A Google search under keywords "linux gimp guide" revealed, amongst other possibilities, this one

http://10steps.sg/tutorials/20-fantastic-gimp-tutorials-beginner-to-pro/

... and if you have not already seen it, nor learned those skills, it might assist? I have bookmarked it for myself.

Cheers

Wizard
@JasKinasis - really liked #9 mate, and a cool way to work into it the band :rolleyes:

Thanks, Wiz. No, I did not know about this one, and will be sure to read it. I have googled Gimp many times before this, though with other words, and came up with other results (mostly on how to download a new version of Gimp), which did not help me in getting unstuck. I had also checked the User Guide that came with my original Linux download (17? Rebecca), that gave tips on getting Gimp unstuck and nothing there helped. Don't remember if I mentioned it, but scaling and exporting were, and so far are, two of the functions I COULD do, which is what allowed me to use My Paint in conjunction with Gimp to have a final product.
 
@wizardfromoz
Heh heh - It wasn't my intention to use the thread to promote my band. Pretty much all of my .xcf files are band-related. Any time I need to create a poster design, or create a banner image for the bands website or FB page, I do it in Gimp.

That particular image was the most recent .xcf file I'd worked on and it seemed to be a pretty good one to use to demonstrate/explain why certain tools might not be working!

@Phylly - If you installed the gimp-help packages, then you should have access to Gimps documentation via the "help" menu in Gimp.
It's worth taking a look at. It contains tips and tutorials for every aspect of Gimp. From basic usage, right through to more advanced things like scripting and extending Gimp.

Gimps documentation is also available to view online. The content is exactly the same as the offline documentation. The link to gimps online help/documentation (in English) is:
https://docs.gimp.org/en/

Gimps built-in (and/or online) documentation and the tutorials in the link posted by Wiz should provide a good head-start!

And if you want to learn how to use Gimp fully - to a professional level - I highly recommend the second edition of "Beginning Gimp: From Novice to Professional" by Akkana Peck - published by Apress.

It's an excellent book which thoroughly teaches every aspect of Gimp, in much more detail than Gimps documentation. Images in the book can also be downloaded from the publishers website, so you can follow along with each of the examples/activities described in the book.

I invested in a copy a number of years ago and it's really helped me to improve my skills with Gimp. It's also been an invaluable reference when I've inevitably forgotten how to do something in Gimp!

Thank you, JasKinasis, the book Beginning Gimp is another help I had no idea of and will be sure to get and read it. As to the User manual, I knew about it, but not this particular version and will be sure to read it as well. Regarding the User Manual, is there a way to download it to my laptop? I ask because there is no link for downloading and I like to have my "computer" stuff readily available and not have to go through bookmarks to find it again.
 
Thank you, JasKinasis, the book Beginning Gimp is another help I had no idea of and will be sure to get and read it. As to the User manual, I knew about it, but not this particular version and will be sure to read it as well. Regarding the User Manual, is there a way to download it to my laptop? I ask because there is no link for downloading and I like to have my "computer" stuff readily available and not have to go through bookmarks to find it again.

I don't know if this is authoritative, but it's a pretty nice (relatively modern) PDF manual for Gimp:

http://gimp.linux.it/www/meta/gimp-en.pdf
 
You do know that that is 901 pages, yeah? :)

I've downloaded it, am going to read a page a day for 2 and a half years and come back an expert :p

Wiz
 

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