GIMP for Mac OS X

The GIMP

Getting and Installing the GIMP

There are various ways to obtain and install the GIMP for your Macintosh. In addition to the source code distribution here on www.gimp.org, there are various alternative sources for packaged and commercially distributed CDs, which aim to make installation and setup an easier task. These include:

MacPorts provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on Mac OS X. They have switched to GIMP 2.3/2.4-rc1 in the latest revisions, but you can still grab a previous one for GIMP 2.2.17. MacPorts places the GIMP binary into /opt/local/bin.
There's a port file for the GIMP 2.3 development version, too. The 2.3 binary is installed to /opt/local/gimp-2.3/bin.

Both files are maintained by Yves de Champlain.
Gimp.app provides a self contained application bundle of GIMP 2.2.11 for OS X. Apple's X11 is required. Gimp.app is packaged by Aaron Voisine.
Fink is a package management system that provides everything necessary to build GIMP 2.0.6. The Fink project is based upon the Debian apt-get package management tools, and can resolve dependencies among the various components necessary for a working GIMP installation. A typical install, however, will require that you have a working C compiler, which Apple supplies on a companion CD to Mac OS X. The current gimp package maintainer for the Fink project is Alexander Strange. The default location for GIMP when installed with fink is /sw/bin/gimp.
In the future, it is hoped that the MetaPkg project will unify several of these installation methods, but the meta packaging system is not yet usable.
The MacGIMP project provides GIMP for Mac OS X in a packaged CD format. The MacGIMP project installs the GIMP in /opt/local/bin. MacGIMP efforts are led by Mat Caughron. Last year he helped the GIMP developers with a donation for their developers conference.

Requirements

The GIMP will only run on Mac OS X, not on version 9 or earlier of the Macintosh operating system. There are a number of reasons why it is unlikely that the GIMP will ever run on older versions of Mac OS. In addition to Mac OS X, the following is a list of what you will need to run the GIMP on your Macintosh:

X Windowing Layer
The GIMP uses a separate windowing layer, the X11 windowing protocol, on Mac OS X, which must be installed first. There are various ways to install an X11 protocol window server. The XDarwin project provides this functionality. Apple does provide their own version of this windowing layer, based on XFree86, which is called X11.app. If you do use OS X 10.3, you can grab it from the Apple downloads site. 10.4 users will find it on the Tiger DVD installer disk.
Graphics libraries and toolkits
Unlike most Linux distributions, Mac OS X does not come with the open source libraries upon which the GIMP is built. These are typically installed along with the GIMP, but can be installed separately. GTK can be built and installed via the various package management systems mentioned above: Fink, DarwinPorts, OSXGNU and others. A complete list of the libraries necessary for a build of the GIMP is given in the main source distribution.

Configuration

Once you have installed the GIMP on Mac OS X, the configuration is very similar to the other UNIX systems. Please have a look at the configuration section on the GIMP for UNIX page for more details.

Help and Documentation

GIMP Documentation

The XDarwin forums are one place to discuss compatibility and installation questions.
In addition, there are forums at the GIMP User Group.

The GIMP's user interface is designed to let you work as efficiently as possible. Since the primary menu in the GIMP is accessed by a right-click in the image window, it is advisable for Mac users (who all have a single mouse button by default) to obtain a multi-button USB mouse. Another workaround for this problem is to configure your window manager, say for example under XDarwin, to map the control-click to be right-click.