How to Enable Photoshop Save For Web Feature in GIMP
In case you are not aware, GIMP is an open source image editing software that is bundled in most Linux distro and is touted as the closest alternative to Photoshop. It comes with plenty of toolset and filters for you to create/edit your image, and the best thing of all, it is free.
However, as good as it can get, there are several handy and useful features Photoshop that are not available in GIMP and one of them is the Save For Web feature. I used the Photoshop’s Save For Web feature extensively as it enables me to optimize my screenshots to the smallest possible size without affecting their quality to a great extent.
Luckily, GIMP supports plugins and there is this plugin available for this purpose.
If you are using Ubuntu (or any other debian-based distros), you can easily install the Save For Web plugin via the following command:
sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry
Better still, click on this link to install.
For Windows users,
- download the save_for_web_0.28.6_win32.zip from here and extract it to your Desktop.
- Open the save_for_web_0.28.6_win32 folder and copy the webexport.exe file to your personal plug-ins folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\<your-username>\.gimp-2.6\plug-ins - Restart your GIMP.
The Save For Web feature is now available via File -> Save For Web.
The interface is similar to that of Photoshop and you can save your file as JPG, PNG-8, PNG-24, GIF.
Personally, I find that the size reduction and image optimization is better than that in Photoshop, but that is only my personal view. What do you think?
Tags: GIMP, Photoshop, plugins, save-for-web
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I’m really sceptical of the usefulness of this addon. Virtually EVERYTHING that is available in that is available in the standard Save As… dialogue. Try it for yourself… open an image, Save As… and expand the “Advanced Options” section (which is collapsed by default) all of those options. One thing missing though is the ability to see a resizeable preview.
So, I’m guessing the thing about this addon is it makes it “more like Photoshop”. No thanks. Many coming from Photoshop to GIMP might be intested in that… but I’ve used GIMP for over 10 years and Photoshop only a few times… so I’m one of those who wishes Photoshop was more like GIMP. :)
I’d rather see an “un-photoshop” option – I still occasionally have people pass me .jpg’s that nothing will load because they have some obnoxious photoshop header on them that nothing else recognizes as jpeg.
That said, I can see the usefulness of what it looks like this plugin does – am I correctly interpreting that it gives you a single save window with scaling and format options right there for preview prior to saving?
Yes, you are correct. It works exactly (almost) like Photoshop.
Well, if you’re a GIMP veteran, you obviously don’t need this plugin and will probably produce better results without the plugin using stock GIMP. But, for the rest of us the plugin can be useful.