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Comment by rleigh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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