Does anyone know of any GIMP (photo editing) replacements? They do not have to have as many features as GIMP (infact, I would prefer it not have as many features as GIMP....this is exactly why GIMP confuses and frustrates me).

GIMP...makes my head asplode....

Thanks.

There are many simpler ones, but mostly there basic paint programs, Theres aso Krita thats progressing nicely, its interface is more standard than GIMPs, but slower for somethings at the moment. I don't know if thats the kind of thing you want, as its trying to pack features in as well.

Digikam, Showphoto, Fspot, Picasa, Gwenview, are a few of the simple photo organizing and editing tools. They do simple crop and resize, fix red eye, add simple effects and text, just the kind of things most average folks do with their photographs, nothing too advanced or difficult. I have been tinkering with Googles Picasa and it seems a pretty decent app for every day stuff, but like it most for its printing features.

I hate GIMPs interface, so these days I mainly use Krita (it currently does not have as many features as gimp, but the interface is a lot better) and Photoshop. If you have a licence for Photoshop, you can install it in Linux using WINE.

Can any of these GIMP alternatives mentioned change the file size? For example, I scanned some pictures at a very high (too high) resolution, and they now have tons of pixels per inch and are more than 2 mb each. Could any of those GIMP alternatives let me "chop" them down to a more easily manageable file size (i.e., fewer pixels per inch or about 200 kb each).

Thanks!

Most if not all software can do that. its is after all just a resize of the image. Some like Krita have a wide selection of alogrithms to do a better job of resizing.

MBA,

For problems as a bunch of files which are too large, check ImageMagick. It is a command line tool, but it is faster that *any* tool for converting a series of pictures.

As for the GIMP, you are right, it is complicated. But you never have to change for another program because a tool might not be included. This GIMP manual might help you. The GIMP IS complicated after all. (Note that this site seems to be a mirror. The original site seems to be off-line often, but that might be a problem with my connection as well)

For photo organizing etc. I use Gthumb which fills most of my needs.

jlinkels

When I scanned some of my 35mm slides at max resolution of my negative/slide scanner, they came out near 30Mb each! (I was saving them in TIFF format - using compression, but not lossy like JPEG - hence the bigger files.) Definitely overkill on the resolution setting, but I wanted to see what it would do. Now I know! I ran one of those through Photoshop, creating many layers and edits in the process, and found myself using over a half gig of ram. Now I scan at lower res. The scans go much faster that way as well. I think the silly things were taking about 15 minutes each with max-res, multi-pass scanner settings. Pretty ridiculous overkill for a 35mm slide that was probably only going to end up as a 5x7" print max!

Give "mtPaint" a go, it is a lightweight editor with some documentation.

mtPaint

Phil

The reason your files ended up with a large size was because you used a higher resolution while scanning the pictures. For example, in my experience when I scan an image at 300 dpi resolution, it will end up with a file size of over 100MB but if I use a lower resolution like 72 dpi then the resulting image is much smaller.

In gimp I was able to easily modify a 150MB tiff image without the program crashing. But it all depends on the amount of memory you have in your system. The more the better.