On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Pietro Calogero wrote:

Hi all,
I need to revert to GIMP version 2.6. Please tell me the proper BASH commands to do this in an Ubuntu system.

Evidently I am not the "power-user" type for whom the GIMP team designed their 2.8 version.
I only have about 20,000 photos, and I need to revise the JPGs or preferably work with PNGs.
I tried resetting the keybinding to "overwrite," but even so, every time I close a file (about 25 x/day) it warns me that I have unsaved changes--because the GIMP PolitBuro has decided that only XCF is worthy, not my miserable uncompressed PNG (which is what I can use for my academic presentations. Default image viewers in Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu don't read the XCF format).

So I need to revert to version 2.6 in a responsible way (repositories, dependencies, etc) while I wait for a fork to emerge so that I can switch to a full-featured raster editor designed by a less-condescending team of developers.

Pietro

'Politburo' and 'less-condescending' as descriptions of the devs who wrote this software which you're using, of your own free will, for free.

And you expect some help? Go troll some Ubuntu boards, this question is more suitable there. Your technical expertise (tell me the proper BASH commands, really?) level is also more suitable for there, with there being ubuntuforums.org.

Found a fabulous solution:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Fix-Improved-Saving-Functionality-in-GIMP-2.8

Someone has written a Python script to re-set the Save function to save changes to a file back in its original format! The webpage above gives instructions for installing (very necessary for a non-programmer), but the python script itself is here: https://github.com/akkana/gimp-plugins/blob/master/save-export-clean.py

My original post may have been crabby, but now I don't need to figure out how to revert to 2.6! I can keep my repos current and I can resume recommending GIMP to my hundred-odd students. Of course, this means abiding by (and teaching) the same caution with raster-editors that has pertained since 1990: protect originals. Don't re-work images in lossy and comressed formats. Sadly, your reply affirms my sense of the condescension in the GIMP community--and I notice that you did not offer any way to revert this interface design back to match an existing working-method. In the spirit of the open-source community, I kept looking. I found a solution to the problem. I share it.

MetroPietro wrote,

Found a fabulous solution:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Fix-Improved-Saving-Functionality-in-GIMP-2.8

Someone has written a Python script to re-set the Save function to save changes to a file back in its original format! The webpage above gives instructions for installing (very necessary for a non-programmer), but the python script itself is here:
https://github.com/akkana/gimp-plugins/blob/master/save-export-clean.py

My original post may have been crabby, but now I don't need to figure out how to revert to 2.6! I can keep my repos current and I can resume recommending GIMP to my hundred-odd students. Of course, this means abiding by (and teaching) the same caution with raster-editors that has pertained since 1990: protect originals. Don't re-work images in lossy and comressed formats.

And surely saving as XCF, which also preserves layers, etc, is an even better approach if images are going to be "reworked"?

You previous said you "need to revise the JPGs or preferably work with PNGs," so with JPGs you are reworking compressed formats.

Sadly, your reply affirms my sense of the condescension in the GIMP community--and I notice that you did not offer any way to revert this interface design back to match an existing working-method. In the spirit of the open-source community, I kept looking. I found a solution to the problem. I share it.

Attachments:
* http://www.gimpusers.com/system/attachments/5/original/save-export-clean.py

That plug-in was announced on this mailing list back in August.

Bob Long

On Fri, 2012-11-23 at 18:38 -0800, Pietro Calogero wrote:

Hi all,
I need to revert to GIMP version 2.6. Please tell me the proper BASH commands to do this in an Ubuntu system.

[...]

I only have about 20,000 photos, and I need to revise the JPGs or preferably work with PNGs.

For 20,000 images I'd recommend learning ImageMagick and doing batch processing. For research in graphics you could also investigate nips2.

Bash is not an acronym, by the way, and does not need to be in capital letters.

You could also use control-shift-e in gimp instead of control-shift-s (save as), and it's really about the same number of keystrokes.

It would probably be condescending of me to tell you where to get a script that reverts to the older behaviour, more or less, or to warn you how unwise it is to use such a script, so I won't do that part :-)

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

[...]
For 20,000 images I'd recommend learning ImageMagick and doing batch processing. For research in graphics you could also investigate nips2.

Thanks! I will investigate both. I used ImageMagick several years ago, but it was only command-line.

Bash is not an acronym, by the way, and does not need to be in capital letters.

Oh. Noob-error. I thought it stood for Bourne-Again SHell.

You could also use control-shift-e in gimp instead of control-shift-s (save as), and it's really about the same number of keystrokes.

I did that at first. So it overwrites, but if I am working with 10-20 files at once, when I go to close each file, GIMP warns me that changes are unsaved, whether I have overwritten (saved) or not. I worry that it will habituate me to 'discard changes' and inadvertently throw away work, or compel me to keep an XCF and an uncompressed PNG of every file I work with. Which adds to file-management labor.

It would probably be condescending of me to tell you where to get a script that reverts to the older behaviour, more or less, or to warn you how unwise it is to use such a script, so I won't do that part :-)

Previous poster mentioned that the Python script I found was announced on this same website in August. Alas I did not find it in my first series of searches, which was why I was despairing and trying to figure out how to safely step back to 2.6. It was difficult to seive out the solution with keywords via Google. Only recommendation I could find for awhile was to remap ctrl-S to 'overwrite.' Unfortunately that means that even if I knowlingly intend to modify a PNG and overwrite the file, GIMP warns me re: 'unsaved changes' when closing, which makes me keep worrying: "Uh-oh. Did I remember to hit ctrl-S this time?"

What still surprises me is that the GIMP developers did not even allow the option of reconfiguring our own setup to work as we have used it with all previous versions of GIMP. It may be extremely hazardous for me to be grabbing a Python script off the net and setting it to executable. I cannot not parse the script to see if it is harmful. But within GIMP, I could find no way to reset to previous behavior, and I did not want to become habituated to the practice of ignoring 'unsaved changes' warnings.

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 8:28 AM, MetroPietro wrote:

Sadly, your reply affirms my sense of the condescension in the GIMP community--and I notice that you did not offer any way to revert this interface design back to match an existing working-method.

Yes, why not expand your imputed condescension from only the developers to the rest of the community.

In the spirit of the
open-source community, I kept looking. I found a solution to the problem. I share it.

I'm sure that same 'spirit of the open-source community' extends to refraining from rude name-calling, especially with regards to developers. And to searching BEFORE ranting, since (as others have already brought up) your 'solution' is well documented on this mailing list. Which of course you missed when doing a search on the list prior to posting (as those who have the 'spirit of the open-source community' tend to do).