GIMP

What's new in this version:

Highlights:
- Micro releases like 3.0.8 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions. While this news post is not an exhaustive list of all fixes, we wanted to highlight some of the ones with a more noticeable impact.

Font Loading Performance:
- Improvements in start-up time for users with a large number of fonts was backported from our 3.2 RC2 release. As a result, we now wait to load images until fonts are initialized - this prevents some occasional odd displays and other issues when an XCF file tried to access a partially loaded font.
- For macOS users, we have special-cased the legacy Skia font, as we received reports that it did not behave properly with the Pango library we use to render fonts. You should now be able to use all fonts weights instead of just Bold.

Assorted updates and fixes:
- Daniel Plakhotich helped us identify an issue when exporting a lossless WEBP image could be affected by lossy settings (such as Quality being less than 100%). We’ve updated our WEBP plug-in to prevent this from happening.
- Jehan fixed a bug in the Windows installer where text would be duplicated in certain languages.
- René de Hesselle diagnosed an issue with font kerning on macOS, which was fixed by Jehan.
- Because of differences in how different operating systems represent file paths, default color profiles were not being loaded correctly on start-up on Windows. This should now be fixed, though you may need to reassign your default color profiles in Preferences to clear out the older, incorrect file path.
- Thanks to Jehan‘s efforts, the standard gimp-3.0 executable can now be run with a --no-interface flag instead of requiring users to call gimp-console-3.0 even on devices with no display. The --show-debug-menu flag is now visible as well.
- programmer_ceds improved our flatpak by adding safe guards to show the correct configuration directory regardless of whether XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined on the user’s system. This should make it much easier for flatpak users to install and use third party plug-ins.
- We fixed a rare but possible crash when using the Equalize filter on images with NaN values. Images that contain these are usually created from scientific or mapping data, so you’re unlikely to come across them in standard editing.
- Jeremy Bicha fixed an internal issue where the wrong version number could be used when installing minor releases (such as the 3.2 release candidates and upcoming 3.2 stable release).
- As noted in our 3.2RC2 news post, we have updated our SVG import code to improve the rendered path.
- Further improvements have been made to our non-destructive filter code to improve stability, especially when copying and pasting layers and images with filters attached to them. Some issues related to applying NDE filters on Quick Masks have also been corrected.
- An unintended Search pop-up that appeared when typing while the Channels dockable was selected has been turned off.
- When saving XCFs for GIMP 2.10 compatibility, we unintentionally saved Grid color using the new color format. This caused errors when reopening the XCF in 2.10. This problem has now been fixed! If you encounter any other XCF incompatibility, please let us know.

Themes and UX:
- The Navigation and Selection Editor dockables no longer show a large bright texture when no image is actively selected. This was especially noticeable on dark themes.
- When a layer has no active filters, the Fx column had the same “checkbox” outline when hovered over as the lock column. This led to confusion about clicking it to add filters. We have removed the outline on hover as a small step to help address this.
- Ondrej Míchal fixed alignment and cut-off issues with the buttons on our Transform tool overlays. All buttons should now be properly centered and visible.
- The options for filling layers with colors when resizing the canvas will be turned off when not relevant (such as when you set layers to not be resized).
- More GUI elements such as dialog header icons will now respond to your icon size preferences.
- Ondrej Míchal has continued his work to update our UI with the more usable Spin Scale widget. He has also updated the widget itself to improve how it works for users and developers alike.

Security fixes:
- Another potential issue related to ICO files with incorrect metadata was reported by Dhiraj. It does not have a CVE number yet, but it has been fixed for GIMP 3.0.8. Jacob Boerema also fixed a potential issue with loading Creator blocks in Paintshop Pro PSP images.
- As part of GIMP 3.0.8, we also updated several dependencies to prevent vulnerabilities. Thanks to Bruno Lopes, our Windows installer now uses a newer version of Python due to several CVEs in Python 3.12.11. We also updated our SVG library librsvg 2.61.3 to prevent a possible NTLM authentication exploit when loading a malicious SVG.

API:
- For plug-in and script developers, a few new public APIs were backported to GIMP 3.0.8. gimp_cairo_surface_get_buffer () allows you to retrieve a GEGL buffer from a Cairo surface (such as a text layer). Note that this deprecates gimp_cairo_surface_create_buffer ().
- gimp_config_set_xcf_version () and gimp_config_get_xcf_version () can be used to specify a particular XCF version for a configuration. This will allow you to have that data serialized/deserialized for certain versions of GIMP if there were differences (such as the Grid colors mentioned above).
- Fixes were made for retrieving image metadata via scripting. GimpMetadata is now a visible child of GExiv2Metadata, so you can use standard gexiv2 functions to retrieve information from it.
- Original thumbnail metadata is also now removed on export to prevent potential issues when exporting into a new format.