Photoshop users who have switched to GIMP will notice that some of the PS features are not readily available in Gimp. Drawing arrows is one of them. As a tech blogger who have to edit plenty of screenshots everyday, there are times where I need to draw arrows on the images to illustrate the point. While this can be easily done in Photoshop, the feature is not available in the default installation of GIMP. Here is what you can do to enable the arrow feature in GIMP.
Go to GIMP Plugins Registry and download the “arrow.scm” file.
Save the file in your GImp scripts folder (In Ubuntu, the folder is located at “/home/username/.gimp-2.6/scripts”).
Open GIMP, you should now see a Arrow option under the Tools menu.
To use the Arrow feature, first click the “Path” icon.
On your image, mark two points. The first point will be the head of the arrow and the second point will be the tail.
Go to “Tools -> Arrow“.
Here is where you can adjust the wing of the arrow and whether to draw a single or double headed arrow. Once you have fixed your settings, click OK. It will proceed to draw the arrow on your image.
This is the end result.
That’s it.
Isn’t that a bit overkill if you’re taking loads of screenshots and editing them? In Ubuntu, I use Pinta which has the same arrow feature as Paint.NET on Windows, and it’s much easier to use. GIMP is obviously tons better for advanced image editing, but I’d avoid it for some quick screenshot editing. :)
Overkill? Not really. I need some of the more powerful features in GIMP. Pinta is good, but it is still lacking in several areas, such as save for web.
Another option: “Use The Right Tool For The Job”. Inkscape offers lots of options for arrowheads, dashed lines and so on; why use that to do these graphical pieces, then import them into Gimp?
Proprietary software like Photoshop has the do-everything mentality because every dollar you spend on somebody else’s software to add extra functionality is another dollar not going to this vendor; so the proprietary software suffers from feature creep and bloat to keep you handing over the cash.
Free Software has no such problems; it doesn’t just tolerate interoperability with other tools, it encourages it. That’s what network effects are all about: the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts.
Hi Lawrence D’Oliveiro.
Thank you very much for you comment. I didn’t know Inkscape, in fact I didn’t even had listen about it. I read you comment and went to know about it, downloaded it and my first impressions are better than my best expectations. I do believe that, after today, I will only use Gimp for what it is designed for, for bitmap images. For geometric-like design, I will probably only use Inkskape. Thanks again, and my best congratulations to the Inkscape development team.
Nice writeup, thanks!
For those following Arrow Tool downloading instructions, be sure to save arrows.scm in your GIMP/scripts folder, not GIMP/plug-ins.
The arrow feature described above works fine for me in GIMP 2.7, but I get a series of warnings, like those I copy below :
WARNING: Plug-In “script-fu”
(/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/script-fu)
called deprecated procedure ‘gimp-image-add-layer’.
It should call ‘gimp-image-insert-layer’ instead!
WARNING: Plug-In “script-fu”
(/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/script-fu)
called deprecated procedure ‘gimp-free-select’.
It should call ‘gimp-image-select-polygon’ instead!
WARNING: Plug-In “script-fu”
(/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/script-fu)
called deprecated procedure ‘gimp-image-add-layer’.
It should call ‘gimp-image-insert-layer’ instead!
(And a notice to the effect that there are too many error warnings, so they have been redirected to «stderr», which doesn’t sound encouraging !)
What, if anything, should I do about this ? If I open «arrow.scm» under «/home/username/.gimp-2.7/scripts», I do indeed find many instances of «gimp-image-add-layer» (this is also the case if «script-fu-pencil-drawing.scm» is opened). When I check «stderr» («standard errors» ?) under «~Hämtningar[i e, Downloads]/found.000/file0070.chk/dev», I find five such warnings. Should the word «add» be replaced by «insert» in all these cases ? Or, in accordance with the principle «if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it», should I leave well enough alone ?…
Henri
thank you very much. as a programmer who fails at simple graphic design and stays away as much as possible, this article/plugin came in very handy.