On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 7:21 PM Zbigniew via gimp-user-list wrote:

Are there any plans to equip Gimp with macro recorder? I mean kind of tool present, for example, in LightRoom, where every change applied to picture is listed on the screen - and one can then copy a whole "procedure" with simple - then apply that series of commands by - onto any other picture, not being forced to start whole procedure all over again.

And such recorded list of procedures/commands - and I mean literally every procedure listed in GIMP's menus, be it internal command or installed script - it should be possible to save it into ordinary text file, and then to use it as a parameter in case of batch processing, I mean something like this (parameters fictional, just example how do I see this):

gimp -procedure recorded-commands.txt --no-gui *.jpg --output new/*.jpg

Something like this should apply recorded actions - one after another - to each *.jpg file found in current directory. I mean batch processing using GIMP in ImageMagick's way. Correcting only one picture - while recording actions during the process - then applying sequence of actions to whole set of next pictures, using GIMP as command-line tool.

GIMP has long history - but if I'm correct it still doesn't have such ability until this day. Yes, I found some tools like BIMP, I found the tips "learn Script-Fu language" - but actually why until now such obvious thing requires learning special programming language? GIMP "knows" what have I done while processing picture, so it should be able to list my actions like this:

sharpen 75%
automatic-white-balance
resize 10% down
some-script-action (applied)
wavelet-denoise
draw-a-line using brush, color etc.

GEGL - http://gegl.org/ was started to revamp GIMP with a new engine that can handle floating point raster images, as well as enable things like non-destructive editing, which is what you are describing. Non-destructive editing is the next thing on GIMPs roadmap, now after porting core to rely on GEGL apis, and the current cycle of porting from GTK2 to GTK3 is done. Non-destructive editing seem similar to scripting and macro recording and the existing GIMP framework for exposing actions for scripting languages. But actual non-destructive image editing belongs in the layer stack together with layer mode operations. The work on porting the functionality of gimp-2.6/2.8 to GEGL is quite complete with 2.10, but the only real feature GIMP has gained/exposed is working at higher bit-depth. There is another wrong direction some people are taking when considering action recorders for GIMP, the undo stack - but due to how it works in GIMP that is also not a fruit-ful way to do it.

You can already use filters that have been ported to be GEGL operations from the commandline - see http://gegl.org/gegl-chain.html for examples on doing this the format uses to describe processing chains on the commandline is compatible with prototype user interfaces for testing GEGL features that are not yet complete or tested enough that GIMP developers want to start adopting them, like non-destructive editing, CMYK support and various other methods for more performant preview rendering, see https://www.patreon.com/posts/24123574 for details on this work as well as how you can support efforts to improve this. Since non-destructive editing is coming up on the GIMP roadmap, a planning session for further plans have been submitted for this years libre graphics meeting,
https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2019/schedule-fri-31-05/ .

/Øyvind -pippin- Kolås - GEGL maintainer