There have been many posts regarding the Gimp interface here. I consider myself what you refer to as a 'casual user', although I use the Gimp on a daily basis. My primary use is to edit photographs for posting to a website. For historical reasons, the preferred image size of the final product is 300x200 pixels. My current camera produces images which scale down to 300x225. Therefore, a part of my normal workflow is to crop the scaled image down to eliminate the extraneous 25 pixels (usually either ground or sky; this is a real estate webpage). Using the 2.2 version, the interface of the crop tool was very handy for me. Typing Shift-c brings up the tool; a quick move of the mouse creates a selection area; over to the tool-option menu that automatically pops up, type in 300 and 200 for the dimensions; now grab the lower-left handle and move the selection as desired, click and it's done. I recently upgraded to Mandrivel 2007, which includes the 2.3. Did my first crop this morning. No tool-option. Okay, clicked on the tools, or view, or some danged thing, found the tool option. Hmmm, a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't really relate to what I am doing. Finally I find some hidden dimensioning menu and enter in the 300 and 200. Grab the lower left corner - whoops! All the corners resize the selection! Handy.... not. Okay, redo it, and eventually discover how I can move the selection. Whoa! Instead of automatically confining itself to the image as before, I can move the selection outside of the image. Now that's *really* handy - like I would ever want to select a certain size and then have part of it outside the image..... Play very carefully with it until I get it to a spot where it aligns with one of the side boundaries, and then very carefully move it down to where I want it. Whoops, now I'm two pixels outside the image, carefully jiggle it back. Whew. What used to be a 10-second task now takes a couple of minutes, and I'm starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome from all the mousing around. I'm really looking forward to the next time I have 16 pictures to get posted by 9:00 am..... I don't know if this is the proper place to post this sort of thing, but I do hope that you developers will consider listening to some of us casual users, as the interface has gotten way too overloaded and user-unfriendly. I seriously am thinking of going back to 2.2, and I shudder to even think of what a mess 2.4 is going to be if this is any indication of "progress". How can a tool so simple in concept and so frequently used as "crop" have been bollixed up so badly? Scott Swanson _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
