Greetings. Today, when I tried to move a layer, it wouldn't move.

So I tried the other layers, and they wouldn't move either. They were moving just yesterday. But today, they just won't budge!

So I wandered around GIMP for a few hours trying to decide whether or not this was actually a bug, and if I wanted to invest the time in reporting it. The last issue I had I've been fine just living with it for the past few weeks. But moving around layers is something I need for my Layer Groups. I had just added a layer to a Layer Group yesterday. But today, they just don't want to move.

Anyway, a few years ago, apparently someone had a similar issue with moving layers. The reply to the post explained that if a layer has no transparency, it can't be moved anywhere except the background. So with this information in mind, I decided to check all of my layers. All of them in multiple files had transparency in all their layers, most including their background layer.

So that wasn't it. This needed more testing, so I played around with it a bit. I created a new image, opening a few layers in there. I made sure all the layers had the alpha channel and deleted their contents to there was only alpha. Then I created a Layer Group. Up until this point, things were working fine. But I couldn't move any of the layers into the layer group by dragging them.

Then I noticed these 2 arrows, up and down respectively, that I had never needed to use before, at the bottom of the layer dialogue. I clicked the up one, and to my surprise, "background" moved between "layer #1" and "layer". I had actually found a way to move it.

That's all fine and dandy, but with more playing around with it, I realized that no amount of pushing the up and down buttons can move layers into a layer group. And thus is the end of this sad tale, spanning a mere 7 paragraphs.