When I was a child, I loved to play around with ‘Painter’ on our old Windows ’89 family computer. I took random pictures from the internet and “painted” over it, or just simply painted something with the programme itself. Over the years, I discovered new image editors on the internet that allowed me to create collages or use certain filters like Photoscape or Google’s Picasa (now replaced by Google Photos). In my late teens, I finally fulfilled my wish to be creative with something other than my simple digital camera and I bought myself a digital single-lens reflex camera. The more I experimented with it, the more I realised that I considered the actual fun part of being creative with photos was still the editing part on my computer. Once I became a bit more advanced with my photography, I looked into image editing programmes and after seeing the prize of professional ones like Adobe Photoshop, I decided that I would go back to what I knew before: a free and open source software.
I downloaded the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which is a free cross-platform image editor available for Windows and other operating systems. The way it is set up is very close to Photoshop. Since most online photo editing tutorials are based on Photoshop, I was able to adapt my knowledge from these to Gimp. However, in a lot of ways, Gimp is much easier to handle than Photoshop. I used it successfully to get paid for some of my projects eventually.
I cannot remember which version of Gimp I first downloaded. Since 2012, the GIMP team released a lot of new versions. They just released newest one GIMP 2.10.22 at the beginning of October 2020. Gimp has come a long way. Peter Mattis revealed the beta version in 1995 for the operating systems Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05, SGI IRIX. Mattis and his fellow student Spencer Kimball wanted to write an image manipulation programme as part of their studies at Berkeley. Their goal was to create something like Photoshop which is why they inspired a lot of the features by it.
“During Christmas break we encountered Photoshop 3.0 and discovered the “joy of layers”. This functionality was deemed absolutely necessary and will part of the next release of the GIMP.”
– Peter Mattis (1996-02-15)
From an archival point of view, it seems that Gimp’s history and the process of its creation is important to the team. The website contains a whole page about the history of the programme which gives detailed information of its creation and the creator’s different strategics. Further, it provides embedded messages from Peter Mattis which are part of a Google email conversation from the 90s that is still publicly accessible. It seems that most of the information is preserved within the Mailing Lists of the people involved in the project.
The official GIMP 1.0.0. was released 1998 and is transforming since then. I must have started using either GIMP 2.6.11. or 2.8.0. Since the image editing programme was more of a creativity outlet tool for me, I was always more interested in its easy handling and good quality as well as its accessibility for free. Apart from that, I think the runners and creators of the image manipulation programme are doing excellent work to preserve the history and information about the different versions of the programme. From the website, it is very visible that they are proud of the long way the software has come!
sIMPly archivists 