I was compelled to work with Gimp quite a bit yesterday, and I have a number of very specific gripes about it.

The biggest one is that it doesn’t remember your working directory. I had to do about 4 screen captures, do some minor editing, and save as eps files. I spent more time navigating through the directory tree than any other task. How hard would it be for it to remember what directory I’m working in, and just stay there? I don’t know. Maybe it’s really hard. But it’s annoying.

The next thing is really the thing that’s bugged me about Gimp from the start. The menus are terrible. Things that are conceptually related are in different menus. Finding the things I want — even the things that I use most frequently — is extremely difficult.

Change an image to grayscale? That’s under Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. But there’s also an Image -> Color menu, and a Tools -> Swap colors and Tools -> Color picker and Filters -> Colors. Yes, I’m sure this makes perfect sense, and is correct and logical, to *someone*, but it drives me batty.

Also irritating is the placement of Tools -> Transform Tools -> Crop and Resize, Image -> Transforms -> Autocrop , Image -> Canvas size, and Image -> Scale Image. These things seem related to me, but they are in three different places. This means that almost every time I want to crop an image, I end up looking at least 2 different places before I find what I want.

Again, I expect this is logical to someone, and that if I used Gimp every day, I’d figure this out. But since I use it a couple times a month, I invariably spend more time hunting than using.

Finally, a minor irritant. File extensions. There’s two modes when you save an image. You can pick the output format, or you can have it figure it out based on what file extension you give the file. But for some reason, I ended up with an eps image that was called feather.gif. I don’t know for sure how this happened, but it wasted a LOT of my time, and somehow I think that just shouldn’t happen.

Yeah, I know, whine, whine, whine. But what I keep reading from the Gimp people is that there are never specific complaints. These are my specific complaints. I know that the menu arrangement thing, which purely “cosmetic”, is actually the hardest of these things, since a logical arrangement is really quite a difficult thing. But it’s also my biggest barrier to using what might otherwise be a very nice product.