GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 724557
Gimp does not display currently selected layer
Last modified: 2014-02-19 04:21:27 UTC
Gimp does not display currently selected layer in the main display window. It seems to display only the top (or maybe the bottom) layer. When one edits in the displayed layer, the changes are not shown. If one succeeds in finding the selected layer (by moving it until it displays), the changes are indeed made. However, if there are many complex layers, it is difficult to find the layer. It becomes impossible to easily edit a layer, one is essentially editing blind. This is a blocker in such a case. (For a few simple layers, it is relatively easy to work around.) If a layer is selected, it is expected that it will be displayed in the main window, and that any edits are immediately displayed. This is how it seemed to work in the past. (a few years ago) Note that my version of Gimp was compiled by my Linux distro (Mageia) with options : --without python --with lzw which they say disables pygimp and enables lzw compression in gif. Please let me know if this could be the cause of my problem.
Editing a layer anywhere in the stack is a valid use case, as layer modes and (in future versions) any operations done to them may cause it to have the desired effect if and only if it is at its current place in the image graph. There could be a quick way to hide all by the currently active layer; however note that what you'll see then may be very different from what you see with all layers being visible. An approach to overcome this problem is described in bug 139874 (in my opinion, this bug here is a possible duplicate), and bug 326267 is related.
andre: Please try clicking the little eye icons next to the layers in the layer dialog. This will allow you to show or hide layers that you do not need if they are in the way.
Thanks for your reply. It is evidently a lack of adequate documentation. The shift/click on the "eye" suggested in bug 139874 works, but the problem is that it is anything but obvious. Clicking on an eye seemed to have absolutely no effect. Various ways to correct this lack : 1) a title "visible?" above the "eye" column. 2) changing the eyes to check boxes would make it a bit more obvious. 3) a mouse-over text describing effects of click and shift-click. 4) options added to context menu if over an "eye". I have been using Gimp off and on for quite a few years. One thing that I have noticed is that almost always when I encounter a problem with Gimp, it is a matter of inadequate documentation. Mouse-overs and better indexed help would aid considerably. It is understandable that the developers, very familiar with the application, are not as aware of this weakness as users : after all, that is why bugzilla exists ;) Also note that it is not clear what the second column does. A similar solution would be useful for whatever it does. We now have a work around, maybe the severity should be "normal" ? (not changed) So IMHO, a solution to this bug would incorporate at least suggestion (3) or (4) above, if not also (1) and (2). (This may also solve 139874, if it doesn't insist on 2 views being displayed.)
(In reply to comment #2) Thanks. I was working on my reply to comment 1 when you posted. I found that when looking at the bug report referred to in comment 1. It shouldn't be too hard to at least do suggestion 4 in comment 3, to avoid having many users stuck by this problem. In a multilayer image, clicking a single eye seems to have absolutely no effect, so it is anything but obvious what they do. It is the same for whatever the second column does. As well as changing the context menu, having mouse-overs would be highly useful, and is almost universal in other applications, even those relatively simple. Although the help articles are very good if one can find them, the help system is anything but easy to navigate. So a keyword search would help tremendously as well.
Sorry but this is just the way layer editing works, use shift-click on the eye to make only that layer visible. Please refer to the bugs mentioned in comment 1. I think we have a bug about searchable help, reassigning to gimp-manual to figure that.
If it is only about being able to search the help, I'll close this as a duplicate, since we already have Bug 152987 If on the other hand there is documentation missing or incorrect for using the layers, I'd appreciate if this bug can be reopened. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 152987 ***