Avoid additional “do you want to save your changes” dialog

Software GIMP
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I have been using Gimp for a long time as an occasional user for some editing, mostly on JPGs, but occasionally also on TIFFs. I have been stumbling over an annoying GUI behaviour every time for the last some years.

What has changed: When I want to save the image, there is just an error message that I must use the export dialog to save JPG or TIFF files. I rarely stumble over this anymore now, but even that happens to me every now and then, because all other programs in the world use the save file dialog to save the file when you want to save it, and only use export when you want to create something completely different, e.g. PDF from PowerPoint file. (In the past, this worked fine in the Gimp, btw.)

But even more annoying, once I have “exported” the image, I have the file I need. Now, when I close the image, the editor complains that it believes I have not saved and asks if I want to discard my changes. This is doubly annoying because: firstly it is misleading, because I have just saved my image the way I need it, and secondly, I have to click the dialogue away every time. And I often edit many images one after the other. And every time! There is also no click box to “do not show this dialogue if the image has been exported previously”.

I have the feeling that as a user you are being bullied, pressured to save all edited images in a Gimp custom XCF format, but I just don’t want that. My photo gallery is JPG and should stay that way, I can’t display XCF in a random viewer (e.g. from a USB stick in my parents’ Samsung TV) or something like that; or, the customer has ordered TIFF images and wants to get TIFF images and not any other format! I have no choice. I already try to avoid Gimp if I can and try to solve tasks differently because it annoys me so much but I want to report this here in the hope that the developers are reading this and offer a sensible solution for it in the future!

It just sickens me every time I use it! At first I thought it was a bug, but no, it seems to be intentional. What are you wanting to achieve with this? Should we pay for Gimp to be able to turn this off? Or do you want me to go to the home devices shop at my parents’ city, where they bought a TV a decade of years ago, and beg them to talk to the manufacturer that the TV shall be able to display XCF images as JPGs in the photo gallery from a USB stick? You’re crazy. They will call me dumb and that’s all. I can’t do that as a customer. And it’s not that important anyway I ever would do that. What is all this about? Have you thought about how many millions of users worldwide you’re annoying with this? How many years of worktime (in total) you’re requiring users to click away stupid messages? Why this crap? Is there any way I can get out of this prison? :sob:

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Of course. Use other software.

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It’s about GIMP’s own format, which, I suppose (I’ve not used it) allows one to go on working with GIMP on the saved picture. Since I realised why the message is there, it hasn’t bothered me. It’s just one more click and I do it automatically. When I was using GIMP a lot, I would often do ctrl-W, right, right, return without even reaching for the mouse.

Yes, I would welcome a don’t-warn-about-not-saved option. But one click right?

Oh… and if I did want such a feature I’d ask politely.

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I thought this had been squashed a decade ago.

For those that yearn for the old save-in-any-format there is a plugin for you.

https://www.shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/

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When I bought my first car (before the days of RKE), it had a “feature” where if you wanted to lock the door before you closed it, you had to hold the handle in as you closed it. If you didn’t, it would unlock. I asked the sales guy why, and the answer was “it’s to prevent you from accidentally locking your keys in the car.”

I parked outside, so wanted the doors locked, so this was a bit of a hassle, but I soon got used to it and didn’t give it a second thought until the first nice day of spring. I arrived at work and when I got out of the car it was beautiful, so I took my jacked off and tossed it in the back, then headed into the office. When I got to the door, I realized that my key (along with all my keys) was in my jacket pocket, which was now securely locked inside the car.

The “feature” hadn’t actually prevented me from locking my keys in the car - it had just trained me to always hold the handle up when I closed the door.

When this GIMP “feature” was released, it caused a huge outcry from users; besides people not wanting to use XCF, it was pointed out that this was a UX issue - Open/Save was not Import/Export.

The developers responded by saying “we don’t care - you will use our workflow whether you like it or not.”

It is intentional, and the the “what are you wanting to achieve” is ostensibly preventing users from losing data, but all it does is punish people who don’t want to use their workflow by making them lose data.

My wife used to use GIMP to crop and do minor exposure adjustments to batches of jpegs. When 2.8 was released, she became annoyed because this slowed her down. She just started clicking the “ignore” button. One day I went to talk to her while she was editing something, and she had to open a different app and accidentally clicked “close” instead of “minimize”. She immediately clicked “ignore”, as the software had trained her to do. Then she said “oh crap, I wasn’t done with that one yet.”

Instead of preventing her from losing work, this simply trained her to ignore the warning, and causing her lose work.

The GIMP developers don’t actually care about users losing data - they just want to increase the profile of XCF.

6

Well, cars didn’t have locked doors many years ago. So the crazy car designers seemed to have forced you into using a key and fully ignored your outcry ?

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Have you thought about how many millions of users worldwide you’re annoying with this?

Have you seen how many users have shown up in tears in forums because former Gimp would let them save their JPG and exit, making them lose hours of work creating layers and selections that would have been “saved” in an XCF. Would you use Word if it saved files only to PDF?

If you don’t think the current behavior is useful, you are probably not using Gimp enough and would be a lot happier with a simpler application.

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This is simply not true. If you open a JPEG in PowerPoint and make changes, PowerPoint saves the file in the PowerPoint file format. You have to export it to get a JPEG.
And that’s true of most other programmes. They save in the internal format and export in the output formats. Especially with JPEG, it’s important because it’s a lossy format and every time you save it, the quality of the image is reduced.

The change in GIMP was designed by a professional user interaction architect after user validation. And the reason for the change was that a lot of users were losing hours of work because they did not expect that they e.g. would not be able to edit the text after saving, or that the layers would be merged into a single layer.

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People’s thoughts may be different. Anyway, if you use the plugin introduced by @rich2005, you can completely avoid this inconvenience. So make a ceasefire, please.

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Imho the discussion about save as/export is still valid. Gimp devs have gone for a behaviour often associated with proprietary software that want to lock in markets via proprietary file formats.

Now that’s obviously not the rationale here but the current save behaviour is overestimating the complex, spend lots of time on image, workflow versus the much more frequent use case of minor cropping or curve adjustments of “flat” files.

Gimp makes cropping 20 images a lot more complicated than it should be. The dialogues add a lot of clicks to such a job.

When the change was first introduced I took part in some feedback around this and back then they seemed to realise that they overemphasize, the valid, xcf use cases and made minor improvements. It never solved the issue though because the new behaviour was already anchored in the project. @Tobias the UX designer said at the time, if my memory serves, that no one had before my contact, fully explained the jpeg edit workflow and when it’s used. He seemed to aim to take it onboard bu never implemented a solution, perhaps it was at the end of his involvement.

Regarding users crying on forums I can ensure you that I have huge issues with making colleagues and family understand the gimp save behaviour. The former working professionally in design software and Photoshop. Photoshop adopted a similar but different export/save behaviour, that annoy users, but is subtly smoother.

Photographers shouldn’t have s hard time seeing that the source is the raw file and jpegs are mostly edited as final output adjustments.

Before this change gimp had a selling point of being better that Photoshop for these quick edits. Colleagues appreciated and used it but since it’s more complicated.

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As I said, I’ve “internalised” ( I suppose I could say swallowed) that extra click and I can live with it. But if it really, really bugged me, then I’d have a go at…

Download the source code. Find out how GIMP marks the loaded image image as “changes written” when it saves the XCF. Find the code for exporting. Write that into it. Customised build. Behaviour exactly as desired.

Not a programmer? No, neither am I (at least not more than one or two hundred lines), although I do have a techie background and it wouldn’t be my first time trying to find something in source code. I’d go on trying as long as it was interesting, then I’d give up. Been there, done the giving up.

But hey, there’s a plug-in. I wonder of it will work with 3.0? One day, I’ll check it out. Until then, I’ll just do that extra click.

Aside:

My current GIMP problem is that the “overwrite” option (3.0) fails to bring up the jpg options dialogue, and I usually want to change some things. So I have to do “Export as,” accept the current file name, and then I get the jpg options. oh my god an extra click or two :wink: . It’s a beta version anyway, so some things will change.