Hello,

I have a suggestion about the general philosophy of a workflow in the GIMP. I haven't found this anywhere in the mail archives, so I'm hoping it's something new.

While working on an image, performing many steps, I often wish that I could go back and change one of the steps that I have performed but not throw away all the work till then. For example make the initial cropping a little less tight. This is almost possible If I still have the Undo buffer, but it's impossible if I closed and re-opened the .XCF. Photoshop allows this to some measure by using Adjustment Layers, but I think there's an even more straightforward way:

Could we have a saving format (as an alternative to XCF) that saves the original starting image and all the steps that were performed till then? Once the file is opened, all the steps are applied in sequence, and editing can continue where it was left off. Previous steps can be changed without affecting the parameters of steps after it (so this is more than just an Undo buffer) and steps can be inserted, moved around, edited... Implementation-wise, this means saving a script of operations performed, and being able to move/change those script commands around. GIMP editing would become a truly reversible process, in a way no other editing software is! (AFAIK) And the GIMP has almost all the scripting functionality built in already, so this is not a huge overhaul project, right?

I can go more in depth about this idea and the (surmountable) issues that would arise, but tell me if I'm making sense so far? Thank you!

Mihai