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Kamal Mustafa
Kamal Mustafa

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Editing images in Linux

tldr; It still painful.

I've just switched to Thinkpad X1 Carbon and running Fedora 30. Really missed the simple Preview app in MacOS.

Basically I just want to do the usual stuff - crop/resize photos for attaching in blog post. And then some more 'advance' stuff like embedding photo in another photo.

For crop and resize, gthumb seem to do the job.

But for embedding image, I have to resort to good old Gimp in the end. Try Krita but I don't see any improvement over Gimp in term of UX.

So to embed image in Gimp, first open the image you want to embed. Select All and then Copy. Use Selection if you only need some part of it. Then open the target image, choose the Selection tools and draw the region you want to embed the image. Go to Edit - Paste into Selection (this is the key thing). The embedded image might not really fit in the target image so you may want to resize it. Go to Layer, the embedded image will appear as new layer, select it, right click and choose Scale Layer.

And that's it.

Top comments (4)

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learnbyexample profile image
Sundeep • Edited

I usually end up searching cli solutions for resizing, adding borders, reducing image size (ex: pngquant for png). I use Shotwell for manual crop, it has some more features too.

I always think about learning gimp (or someother tool), but never did for past 5+ years of Ubuntu :D

To create cover images or flow diagrams, I use draw.io which has a nice UI

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k4ml profile image
Kamal Mustafa

Well, learning gimp has been on my todo lists since 20 years ago ;)

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johannesvollmer profile image
Johannes Vollmer • Edited

Have you searched for online web apps? I'm confident there must be some online photo editing web app somewhere! There's even a 3D modelling app called clara.io

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k4ml profile image
Kamal Mustafa

Right. A friend pointed to me photopea.com/ after I shared this with them.