GIMP 3.0 Review: Is This the Future of Free Photo Editing?

If you’re a small-time photographer, you might only need to perform occasional editing on your photos, and thus don’t want to dish out big bucks for tools like Adobe Photoshop.

There’s good reason to feel this way. Photoshop now costs over $20 per month. Even Lightroom will cost you over $10 per month to maintain.

This is the reason GIMP has been the leader among free image editors.

However, it has been “gimped” for over two decades by a few small issues that came with the GIMP 2 version. Issues that sometimes led to a frustrating lack of instructions, missing options, or even the ability to revise edits made just hours earlier.

The “new” GIMP 3.0 (technically 3.0.6 being the current stable version as of October 2025) aims to remove some of these downsides.

So, I’ll dive into how this new version of GIMP works if you need quick photo editing on zero budget.

Installing GIMP 3 and Performance

First, the installation process of the tool can vary significantly depending on which operating system you have.

You can usually download the installer for Windows, Mac, or popular UNIX-based systems directly from the website.

But if you have a less widely used system, you may need to perform additional installation checks and modifications.

As far as actual performance is concerned, GIMP 3 was supposed to work better with modern systems, especially since we’ve had 20 years of PC hardware skyrocketing in performance.

That said, some of these performance improvements might not register if you have an old laptop that used GIMP 2.x versions and upgraded to GIMP 3.

Additionally, one of the first things you might want to do is switch to the “System” theme, as it makes the all-gray UI much less oppressive. For one, you can actually see which options are selected.

The “Legacy” icon pack is also great if you want your icons to be a bit more discernible from one another, given that the default state is black-and-white for everything.

For some reason, the left-hand sidebar is also incredibly narrow to start with and needs to be expanded if you want to get the full list of options within a section.

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New Features

Non-Destructive Layer Editing

This is arguably the biggest game-changer for many photo editors, especially if you’re used to high-end apps like Photoshop.

Previously, whenever you would make changes to a particular layer in GIMP, it would “stick” to the original image, changing the default pixels to match the edits.

While you could always undo changes when performing quick edits, this could be practically impossible if you’ve been working on a single image for a while and have a lot of edits to go through.

I tested this by using a portrait photo and going through some of the most basic changes like blur, outlines, or color overlays. Each option is done in a separate layer, so I could easily swap between them or delete them to undo changes.

Intuitive Layer Manipulation

One of the main issues with GIMP 2 was that copy-pasting would create a “floating selection” that needed to be manually converted into a layer.

Well, in GIMP 3, this has been solved entirely.

Copying an item onto the image creates a new layer automatically, which allows you to more easily add items to photos (or remove them) without going deeper into layer-changing.

Additionally, modifying multiple layers in bulk has been made a bit simpler.

All you have to do is select all the layers you want to modify, then use the toolbar to create changes as you want.

This can be excellent if you want to apply sweeping changes or finalize the image to bring it into its own layer.

Plus, it makes using filters so much easier, as they can be put on every layer in the image at once rather than creating a separate filtering layer each time.

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Real-Time Previews

This might sound like such a basic thing you’d need for editing, because it is.

GIMP 2 had previously required you to actually apply the changes and hit the undo option if you wanted a “preview.”

With the new GIMP version, applying a filter creates a preview of how it would look on the current layer.

Then, you can quickly cycle through multiple filters to see which one you want to keep.

Exporting and File Type Improvements

One added change that actually seems to have been a bug is that GIMP no longer saves metadata by default.

Ordinarily, this could lead to a bit of information loss, as the content in the metadata could trace back to your profile or changes made to the file.

However, this has now been changed to be the default behavior, removing important data from the image when it gets exported to a file other than GIMP’s default.

You can still find the option to preserve more metadata changes in Settings, but you might not even need to check it if all you’re doing are small changes that don’t need to be meticulously tracked.

Plus, with the ability to save changes by layer, you might even need the option to save metadata if you use good storage and project management practices.

What Works in GIMP

Filters and Effects Made Easy

One section where GIMP always fared much better than expected for a free program is the filter and effect selection.

With GIMP 3, this has been made slightly better by expanding the Generic Graphics Library.

Plus, the “GEGL Styles” plugin can be incredibly useful once you spend a bit of time tinkering with it. And it comes with additional graphics options for text editing and manipulation.

If you already have a solid photography setup, this can be great to add a finishing touch or create promotional materials out of your work.

Text Manipulation

Expanding on the previous topic, working with text has been made relatively simple in recent GIMP versions to the point where you can almost get a basic text box editor inside a layer to add simple text changes in seconds.

And the expanded options only add to the possibilities.

For example, I could manipulate text to follow circular shapes smoothly, and the layer-based text handling meant I could go back and edit any text element without starting over.

One thing I did have a bit of an issue with is the font selector, as it highlights by default, which means copied text sometimes goes there unexpectedly. But once you understand this quirk, the workflow is solid.

Object Snapping

Similar to what you might have in Photoshop, editing or inserting new objects into images is incredibly smooth.

When moving objects around the canvas, GIMP helps you align elements by snapping them to logical positions.

These include centering on the canvas, aligning with other layers, or matching distances between objects.

I used this constantly when creating social media graphics with multiple text and image elements. Instead of eyeballing alignment or using manual guides for everything, the smart guides do all the heavy lifting.

What Might Irk You

Performance

While performance improvements have been one of the core points of getting GIMP 3 over GIMP 2, it’s not all good news.

GIMP 3 still feels occasionally sluggish, especially when you’re loading images or trying to work through menus. In some cases, there’s a noticeable lag when trying to even open the basic “File” or “Edit” tab from the toolbar.

Plus, some computationally intensive processes still take a long time.

Supposedly, GIMP 3 should’ve featured multi-threading as a baseline, which should’ve increased processing capability, but this might not really work in practice for the most common edits.

Additionally, the program doesn’t have any GPU acceleration, unlike Photoshop and similar to Krita (another popular free-to-use graphics program).

This means your machine might not actually get the best performance regardless of its hardware.

No AI or Generative Options

While Photoshop and other similar editing tools have already embraced AI as the “default” editing tool and assistant, GIMP is still keeping everything manual.

That means your only real option for making “automated” changes is to use the rudimentary fill option, which honestly doesn’t seem that useful in the first place.

However, what GIMP does have is a good plugin library due to its open-source design and interface.

Thus, some GIMP plugins, like Resynthesizer, add content-aware fill and machine learning to make the process slightly easier.

But one quirk of adding plugins is that they can be notoriously difficult to actually install, as not all of them can be found or downloaded from the program itself.

So, if you’re looking for AI solutions, you might need to go through a lot of possible options, none of which are truly vetted by the designers themselves, and which could get obsolete over time.

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Import-Export Options

When you first try to import an image into GIMP, you’ll likely get messages detailing how the RGB system needs to be adapted to apply to GIMP itself.

This might sound like a one-off thing, but it’s not.

Instead, GIMP uses a default file system that is entirely different from Photoshop and many other photo editors.

And the files are typically not even camera-ready unless you change them manually.

What all this means is that the “Save” option practically doesn’t work here, and you’ll need to use the “Export” instead.

And that brings even more confusing settings into play, which you might need to get the result you want.

Also, the exporter can be incredibly sluggish, as some PCs needed more than a few seconds to load it.

Non-Destructive Might Not Mean Much

While a lot of layer filtering changes have been made non-destructive in the GIMP 3 release, this is not all-encompassing.

Instead, some basic features like painting or selection can still work destructively.

This means you’ll have to learn to save your workflow often or only make smaller changes that can be more easily undone.

Best Practices for GIMP

Here is what you might want to focus on when starting out with the program.

Download the manual and learn the shortcuts.

While GIMP might seem overwhelming at first, a lot of the “basic” editing tools are put on shortcuts that might not align with the UI of Photoshop or other editing tools.

You might need to invest a bit of time to get it working, but you can speed up your workflow considerably when doing so.

Try not to use the mouse wheel as often.

One of the major issues you might have at first is that the mouse wheel automatically changes any setting that is currently hovered over in the toolbar.

This can be surprising, especially considering that you can’t scroll through advanced settings for toolbar options (and that the toolbar itself is scrollable).

How Does It Stack Up?

One of the major benefits of using GIMP or another open-source software is that you’re inherently not locked into changes.

Whenever Photoshop adds a new feature or removes an older one, the subscription system means it’ll be updated on your end relatively soon, and the old version deleted.

By contrast, you can still find and download GIMP 2 (hypothetically, as there doesn’t seem to be many logical reasons to do so) to work in the older environment.

But by far the biggest benefit to using GIMP is the price: $0.

For the amount of editing options you get, the tool is a great alternative to professional-grade paid tools, and some of the basic filters will likely surprise you.

However, that freedom does come with a downside.

GIMP 3.0 took a whole 20 years to create, and it was still published with a decent number of bugs that needed to be squashed over the past year.

While the developers have suggested that the release schedule will accelerate with GIMP 3 – and it did a bit – there’s still no assurance that this will continue in the future.

Plus, since GIMP itself is free, some of the more time-saving options, like AI generative fill, might never make it into the default program where they can be updated.

This can be a real downside if all you need to do is light editing that follows a structure the AI can understand and process.

Instead, what you might want to do is use an AI suite to start the work and finish up with GIMP to get it publish-ready.