The current development version of GIMP is finally available as a macOS package! 🥳

» Download it on gimp.org “Development Downloads” page «

So what’s happening with GIMP on macOS?

Fixed regressions in recent macOS versions (selection outlines and slowness)¶

Ever since the Big Sur release a year ago, macOS users have been experiencing regressions such as invisible selection outlines (a.k.a. “marching ants” 🐜) and general lack of responsiveness. These would happen for everyone using GIMP on macOS Big Sur or newer, whatever GIMP version (some people reported these issues even for old GIMP 2.8 packages). This was caused by changes in the operating system itself.

The slowness issue had been mostly worked around by Des McGuinness, our previously very active macOS package maintainer, though GIMP’s responsiveness may still not be on par with other platforms.

We recently fixed the selection outline visibility issue as well and then backported the fix to GIMP 2.10.28 DMG package! Therefore we encourage everyone still having this issue to use the latest package, either stable 2.10.28 or the unstable 2.99.8.

Team news: new package maintainer¶

Our new macOS package contributor, Lukas Oberhuber, has been working very hard to improve the packaging scripts, clarifying the process by merging two repositories in one, getting rid of various useless files and build rules and directly using modules of the upstream gtk-osx project (when possible) rather than duplicating rules.

He simplified our gimp-macos-build repository a lot, which should hopefully lower the entry barrier.

Finally, he fixed several bugs and environment code directly in the GIMP codebase to bring our development code up-to-date with macOS support.

As a consequence, Lukas is now officially a new co-maintainer of the macOS package. Welcome and congratulations, Lukas! 🥂

New contributors are still very very welcome 🤗¶

There are still serious macOS-specific bugs in both the stable and the development series. They are being worked on by Lukas who is supported by the core team, yet there are limits to what a single person is able to achieve.

For at least the past 10 years, GIMP has not been able to have two active macOS developers at once. In fact, this is the second time this year that we publish a macOS-only news post, which is not a good sign at all. It means being able to release improvements for this operating system is exceptional enough that we feel like we should inform people.

So we re-iterate our call for contributors. Do you like GIMP? Do you use macOS and have technical knowledge and skills for packaging and/or development? Then please consider joining us!

We’ve detailed the building process in the README.md file of the gimp-macos-build repository. This is the first thing potential contributors ask us about.

Once you make sense of our build scripts and are able to compile your own local copy of GIMP, please talk to Jehan or lukaso on IRC (#gimp channel on GIMPnet - irc.gimp.org), though others may be able to help too of course. If you already have specific solutions to existing problems, we can push your patch to a branch and generate a new DMG build for testing.

What’s next¶

As usual, we hope that macOS support will improve and that we won’t feel the need to make dedicated news again. In the end, it depends on macOS users, since GIMP is a full community Free Software. It is what we all make of it, together. The community has many Linux and Windows developers. We also get regular *BSD and even Hurd patches (seriously). How come we barely get any macOS developers?

Having M1 support is also a topic we have been discussing obviously. It will likely require more stable contributions for this to happen. So come in and contribute, everyone, it might be cold ❄ outside, but it’s warm 🔥 in here.

Finally, please don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP.