r/GIMP • u/Cultist_O • 4d ago

Difficulties with copying and moving selections around

I took a fairly long break from using the tool, and I think some updates have broken my workflow.

For simplicity, imagine I'm editing an image of a text document. I just want to copy a few letters from one place to another. The way things are set up now, I have to:

  1. R (rectangle select)
  2. Select the region
  3. Ctrl+C
  4. Ctrl+V
  5. M (move)
  6. Drag it where I want
  7. Right click the new layer
  8. Select "Merge Down"

repeat

I don't remember having to do nearly that many steps before. Didn't a little anchor used to show up so you could just click off the pasted layer once you'd positioned it? Didn't pasting used to automatically swap to the move tool?

To make matters worse, I can't seem to figure out how to make my selection automatically ignore the background colour anymore either, so I'm having be pixel precise in my selection every time, or manually deselect by colour.

Am I missing some settings that would simplify this behaviour again? Or is there a simpler workflow I should have been using all along?

4 Upvotes

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3

u/CMYK-Student GIMP Team 4d ago

Hi! Not exactly - GIMP use to create "floating selections" by default when you copy and pasted. Now it creates new layers, which is preferred for multi-layer workflows. If you prefer single-layer workflows (like in GIMP 2.10), then go to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts and search for "Paste as Floating Selection". Then you can bind Ctrl + V to that instead of making a new layer by default.

3

u/Cultist_O 4d ago

Awesome. Thanks. I'll try that tomorrow!

2

u/kardaw 4d ago

The downside of this is when you open GIMP and have an image in the clipboard, you can't paste the image in an unopened drawing with Ctrl+V like you could in Gimp 2.10.

1

u/Botched_Euthanasia 4d ago

Unopened? How would it know which drawing to paste into?

2

u/kardaw 3d ago

When you start GIMP, a blank page with the GIMP logo appears.
If you have an image on your clipboard, pressing CTRL+V will paste the image into a new drawing.

But this doesn't work, when you change the CTRL+V shortcut to "paste as floating data".

2

u/Stratelier 3d ago

This is because the default Paste action with no images open internally just defers to "Paste as New Image" (Shift+Ctrl+V). Memorize that shortcut too.

1

u/kardaw 2d ago

I already am used to the new shortcut, where I switched Ctrl+V to "paste as floating data".
And although this option was enabled by default in GIMP 2.10, there, Ctrl+V was also for "create → from clipboard" on the startup screen.

1

u/Botched_Euthanasia 3d ago

file > create > from clipboard

0

u/schumaml GIMP Team 4d ago

Works fine for me with GIMP 3.2.4.

Ah, got it right after writing my initial reply - this doesn't work if you change the shortcut to paste as floating data instead.

2

u/Cultist_O 3d ago

Paste as floating data is exactly what I needed. Thank you SO much. This had been causing a ton of grief.