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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

that’s not it at all. everyone implementing an image editor knows what a gaussian blur is, but the average person doesn’t. it requires active effort to forget what you know and empathize with someone who is seeing these concepts for the first time. In my opinion, it’s an effort that the volunteers working on GIMP aren’t obligated to put in if they don’t feel like it

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Using "GEGL" IS it. That is not an industry-standard term familiar to users of image-editing software. "Gaussian blur" is.

The GIMP team actively changed their software to better support user workflows, like when they moved from "save as" (with image formats as options) to "export". So there definitely is intent there to do the work necessary to make the software useable for their target group.

Problem was: the change was explained in terms of user persona and their workflows, but there was no mention of user tests...

Honestly, I found that one of the most user-hostile workflows they implemented to date. It's really obnoxious.

The number of times I've wanted to save in their native XCF file format is... zero. But I always want to save in a standard image format, and I don't really consider that to be exporting, just saving.

I understand why they wanted this, but I don't think many of their actual users did.

They do that to preserve data. If you’re making a complex image with all sorts of layers and masks and then you save to a JPEG, you lose all that information as the image is flattened and compressed. Saving in the native format lets you be able to open the file again at a later time and resume working without losing any data.

Users would be seriously upset if they made JPEG the default and the native format a buried option. People would be losing data left and right.

Saving as XCF still loses the undo history so it's really a question of which/how much information is lost. Meanwhile if you have a single layer image and export it to PNG which preserves as much relevant information as saving it as XCF it will then still complain about unsaved data if you try to close it. Absolutely infuriating behavior that no real user ever asked for.

I don’t know, pretty much all production software I’ve ever used has made a distinction between export and save. Because export takes compute and can change the output, not all formats are created equal.

Saving in the internal format is probably rare if you’re just a user, but if this is a 40 hour a week job, then the compute time savings and potential disk space saving from doing that might be worth it.

The problem not being able to make the save/export decision from the same dialog. A lot of software lets you do "save as" and pick a different format AFTER you go down the File/Save path.

Having to cancel out of File/Save and go back to the File menu and choose File/Export, over and over and over in software that defies this convention, is incredibly irritating.

Affinity does the same thing; I don't remember about Photoshop.

The obnoxious thing is separating "save" and "export" into different menu items. Much (most?) software lets you choose "save as" (including saving as a different format) from the regular File/Save dialog. But Affinity Photo (and apparently GIMP) forces you to cancel out of the Save dialog for the millionth time and go back to the File menu and choose "Export." It's annoying and unnecessary.

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