10 ms·

3.0 is big for GIMP. Lots of features to make it viable for simple Desktop Publishing and YouTube thumbs. Created a quick poster: https://i.imgur.com/pPgy255.p

by geenat 2y ago

3.0 is big for GIMP. Lots of features to make it viable for simple Desktop Publishing and YouTube thumbs. Created a quick poster: https://i.imgur.com/pPgy255.png https://i.imgur.com/pPgy255.png Stuff that needs work: * UI/UX: "Tool->GEGL Operation..." is too much friction for such a common operation- just pop it up when you click on the "FX" button in the layers window. * UI/UX: Naming. Drop shadows and glow are currently not discoverable (its squirreled away in the generic "GEGL Styles"). * UI/UX: "Move Tool" should act like a common entry point to other tools if you're not dragging. Switch to "Transform Tool" if I single click an image layer. Switch to the "Text Tool" if I single click a Text layer! Please! * UI/UX: Copying/pasting layer styles does not work. Users can overlook many issues if you can duplicate/destroy layer styles easily. Preset system is cumbersome. Idea: Presets usable from the Layers window directly (could be just add/apply presets) would help a lot, but just copy/paste would probably be better. * BUG: Layers often clip GEGL Glow. Again could be worked around by just easy copy/paste of layer styles. See clipping present on "GIMP Halloween Party" text in my image.

chirau 2y ago
May I ask a not so smart question... What is the big deal with thumbnails for YouTube videos. Like, I am always hearing about these thumbnails as if they can make or break a video/channels outcomes.
- Conan_Kudo 2y ago
  Because they can. The thumbnails are the first impression of a video, and if it isn't attention-grabbing, the video suffers.
- danielheath 2y ago
  At the end of a video, youtube shows thumbnails for several "suggested next videos". The thumbnail, video name and channel name are the only bits of information potential viewers see - if your thumbnail isn't good, they aren't even going to _start_ your video, let alone keep watching it.
  - smohare 2y ago
    [dead]
- xingped 2y ago
  Think of it like a book cover. Regardless of a book's title or summary, an attractive (attracting? attention grabbing?) cover will get more people to click it. Also depending on where the thumbnail is displayed, you may not see the full video title, such as the grid after a video finishes playing.
  - technion 2y ago
    I have tobwonder how many variations of "gaping mouths and shocked expressions" we can come up with.
    - smohare 2y ago
      [dead]
    - xingped 2y ago
      I do hate that style of thumbnail too. But hey, it just tells me not to click on the video. So it serves its purpose for me. But metrics I guess tell the youtubers that that thumbnail brings in lots of traffic. I think especially younger kids gravitate to it, unfortunately.
      - KetoManx64 2y ago
        https://dearrow.ajay.app/ https://dearrow.ajay.app/ will replace those thumbnails automatically for you
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Unfortunately, the addage doesn't hold. You can pretty much judge the YT video by the cover.
    - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      I guess you’re in the minority of thinking people.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Though I haven't seen stats to back it up - I've heard from multiple sources that thumbnails which include a gigantic bobblehead of the author with a particularly exaggerated stupid looking expression on their face induce more people to click through. Even if it's for the sake of feeding the algorithm, I do my best to skip them. I also internally prioritize videos which: - avoid usage of superlatives "TOP X", "BEST OF Y" - have more than 5k views and less than 250k views. After a while, my YT recommendations have become mostly solid.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It's called YouTube Face[1] and the fact that it works makes me weep for humanity. 1: https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-youtube-face https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-you...
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      > It's called YouTube Face[1] and the fact that it works makes me ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ) (fixed it for you)
    - araes 2y ago
      From looking at the link you posted, the immediate consideration, is it looks like they're all optimizing for a pornography face. Would not be very surprising based on the reputation of the internet.
  - gblargg 2y ago
    I mostly skip videos with arrows in the thumbnails.
    - p_ing 2y ago
      PBS Space Time started doing it. Along with some clickbait/pull titles. I stopped watching.
      - abenga 2y ago
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  Everyone knows you need the mouth open dumb face or the completely fake AI image for max brain rot which drives views and "engagement" (commenting on the fact that it's nonsense with people then defending the video as an authority as if it isn't stock footage with an AI voice reading a reddit comment).
  - giuseppe_petri 2y ago
    I've been calling this concept "enragement". I'm sure I'm not the only one.
- grandempire 2y ago
  Mr Beast says he designs the thumbnail before making the video, then plans how to make a video to fit it.
  - SunlitCat 2y ago
    That sounds kinda like first finding a name for a software project (or the final product) and then design the product around that name! :D
    - cl0ckt0wer 2y ago
      More like designing the storefront before designing the business.
      - speckx 2y ago
        Or getting a domain name before doing everything else.
    - grandempire 2y ago
      It does sound silly, but it also points to shallow nature of YouTube content. If you don’t have a good thumbnail it’s going to limit the success of your video because some percentage won’t click on it. It’s just how it goes.
- loeg 2y ago
  It's like a headline in visual form. The most attention-grabbing thumbnail gets the clicks.
- phire 2y ago
  You know how YouTubers are always talking about how "the algorithm" didn't like this video, or loves that video. Or that "the algorithm" is a huge black block which nobody knows how it works. Youtube's "the algorithm" will make or break both videos and channels. But "the algorithm" isn't really a mystery. At a basic level, it just shows a bunch of video recommendations to viewers, and measures if they click it or not (watch time, comments, likes also factor into the algorithm, but none of that matters if they don't click first). The higher the click-through rate, the more the video is pushed in recommendations. And the only things a viewer sees is the thumbnail, channel name, and video title. They have to decide which video they are going to watch based on just that. So really, a large chunk of "the algorithm" is just how appealing your thumbnail is to potential views.
  - mrheosuper 2y ago
    not sure if this is good thing, but recently i've seen youtube recommend videos from very small channel(sub <10k)
    - dboreham 2y ago
      Like thread priority inversion.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      I think there’s a randomized inclusion of new content just to see if anyone clicks it.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I think the mystery is in the categorization of interests and user profiling. The click is central to the process, but the magic is getting your pie video in front of someone on a baking video binge, and not someone trying to to fix their oven.
  - chaorace 2y ago
    There actually is an outcome worse than a missed click: if too many viewers are abandoning your video within the first few minutes (i.e. before midrolls), you'll experience substantial downranking. More or less, the art of making a successful video requires: * An attention-grabbing thumbnail * A curiosity-provoking title & premise * A strong hook which convinces the viewer to put the screen down and let it run * Editing which delivers the information at an engaging (yet monetizable) pace * Packaging said information so that it is intelligibly balanced across the mediums (audio/text/video) * ^^^ Doing this all in a style which still retains enough uniqueness to establish a repeat viewerbase "The algorithm" is a system for efficiently delivering novel videos with these qualities to the audiences who will most eagerly consume them, which is an essential function for a platform with 2 billion monthly users. For every video on lowest-common-denominator celebrity junk, there's a dozen niche videos tailored to some ravenous subculture or other. Not all magazines are tabloids... but just about anyone can kill time with a tabloid, so that's what leads. Unlike magazine stands, however, the platform will eventually learn to only show you the thumbnails for videos you'll want to finish watching. It's almost embarassing to share... but here's an example batch of 12 recommendations, almost all of which I'm likely to (eventually) click on and fully watch: https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png
- bloqs 2y ago
  Youtube content is driven heavily by children and sheltered people who are easily engaged with animalistic displays of expression and bright colors. I wish I was joking
  - chris_wot 2y ago
    Hey, some of less unsheltered adults are swayed by it also!
  - typeofhuman 2y ago
    Do YouTube engineers make great content, are they allowed to? I've interacted with Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitch engineers. But yet to with a YouTube engineer.
    - KetoManx64 2y ago
      Mostly videos about:getting chai lattes on the roof, 3 course meals from 4 star restraunts for lunch and yoga sessions in the early afternoon after a quick meeting with the manager. Aka "Average day in the life of a YouTube engineer"
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        those are produced by recruiting
        all2 2y ago
        So I need a job on the recruiting team. Got it.
      - eru 2y ago
        Google food isn't actually all that great in most of their offices. Sydney, where I used to work for them, is pretty good; New York is decent. But I was rather underwhelmed by my visits to Mountain View.
        2y ago
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  It's really embarrassing at this point. Even once-respectable content creators feel that they must now resort to absurd mugging in every thumbnail.
- brudgers 2y ago
  From my practical experience, they seem to make a difference in initial engagement which in turn makes a difference in algorithmic promotion which in turn makes a difference in overall “performance.” Tracking what you click on versus what you don’t, you might recognize that certain thumbnails make you more likely to take a pass. For clarity, my experience is at hobby scale and part of that hobby is learning about youtube. Trying to make the line go up is fun (until it isn’t) and a little attention to thumbnails seems to make the line go up.
- JohnTHaller 2y ago
  It's a smart question. It wouldn't seem to make much difference since you'd assume people would have channels they're subscribed to or search for something specific. Much of YouTube watch time is based on discovering new videos. And a big part of that is the thumbnail people see when they're looking at suggested content, related content, or search results. Colors, whether there are faces, fonts, images, etc all make a difference. And it varies over time and genre. YouTube has tools built in so you can A/B test different thumbnails and automatically select the better performing one. Note that I haven't done any of this myself except for making a couple thumbnails for personal videos. I was curious and watched a YouTube video about thumbnails and why they're important.
  - ako 2y ago
    What capabilities was gimp missing to create these thumbnails?
- numpad0 2y ago
  I think there's a minor confusion going on here with respect to what constitutes a good YouTube thumbnail as well as what are good YouTube contents. Very few of channels I subscribe and watch, such as Forgotten Weapons, Technology Connections, Scott Manley, USCSB, CuriousMarc, media.ccc.de, etc. uses that open mouth YouTube face for their thumbnails, if they display a human face in a thumbnail at all. I would consider Doug Demuro videos to be embarrassingly deep into "typical YouTube stupidity" realm to admit watching, but even he tend to leave his mouth less than fully open. Do they not engineer their thumbnails to "appease the algorithm" - they do, by showing accurate and intriguing previews of what is to be presented, that for those channels often happens not to be an adult male human face with all orifices articulated to near or past mechanical limits, which, by the way, is an another one of optima. The statement "one can(not) judge a book by its cover" is not functionally equal to "books dipped longest in fluorescent yellow dye sell the most", at all. Apples and oranges both have their place.
kijin 2y ago
If it's a menu or toolbar and it mentions GEGL, it's wrong. GEGL is not something that end users should have to care about. Not to mention superfluous, since almost every fancy operation uses GEGL under the hood anyway.
glandium 2y ago
It always bothered me that some things were tucked away in "obscure" submenus, especially when the obscurity is an implementation detail. Really, it doesn't matter that GEGL operations are... GEGL operations.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  Isn't that the classic problem of software engineers also being responsible for UX? There's a reason UX is a whole field of its own.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Exactly this thread. I use Adobe suite of software, and I really don't even know what GEGL means. Nor should I need to know. Organize filters by function. Blur->radial/Gaussian,linear,etc. Noise->add/remove/etc. Designing the UI based on how the code a filter operates is cool for where the .cpp files live is not how the users think. Then again, a user of GIMP over other apps probably does filter that user into a more techy side of user than artistic side, so I'm probably eating a bowl of crow soon. Seems like maybe time for FOSS UIs to start a Fiverr account looking for UI/UX peeps.
    - brudgers 2y ago
      If you use Adobe, you’re not the prime design persona.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        I don't get the implication. I never claimed I was a designer. I'm a get shit done type of person. An operator if you will. Scariest thing you can show me is a Cmd-n blank sheet of paper. Give me content and a task, and it'll get done. Your assumption I'm a designer is just that, and I'm perfectly fine being an ass on my own and do not need your help
        ChadNauseam 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
oblio 2y ago
Few people would associate "Gimp" and "simple UI/UX". It's been that way since I can remember, at least 20 years.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I wouldn’t exactly, but some menus are more predictable (for me, at least) than in Photoshop etc. Filters are also more logically organized (or at least were before 3.0, I haven’t tried it yet but given the discussion around whatever the fuck GEGL operations are doesn’t give me a lot of hope)
moron4hire 2y ago
Yeah, be careful where you post that poster.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
WTF is a "GEGL" operation? I've been using (and have written) image-processing and -manipulation tools for decades, and I've never heard of such a thing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eco 2y ago
  GEGL is just a library created to modernize GIMP's image manipulation pipeline. It forms a DAG of image operations. It's what unlocked non-destructive edits and porting everything over to it was a pretty massive undertaking (though it probably didn't need to take 20 years...) End users really don't need to know about it. Its exposure in the UI is likely just because a lot of stuff it can do isn't available yet in the traditional GIMP UI.
  - code_biologist 2y ago
    I'm a data engineer so DAG/node systems in content creation software delights me (Blender, Resolve, Houdini). Terrible it's hidden behind the name "GEGL Operations". I'm exactly the person who will get it and love it immediately, but will never find it. Sounds like your parent commenter is the same. GIMP has always been a leader in UI self-owns.
    - stuaxo 2y ago
      I think they don't want to expose the name "GEGL" anywhere, now it's working would be the time to sort that out.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Yep. I learned to appreciate node-based systems in Shake. Just a great way to work.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    That is contradictory: "End users really don't need to know about it... a lot of stuff it can do isn't available yet in the traditional GIMP UI" So why "don't they need to know about it?" And regardless, putting a meaningless label on it is a user-hostile blunder. This blunder is not all that uncommon either. Affinity did it by burying a bunch of stuff under a menu item called "Studio." Not as bad as "GEGL", but still meaningless.
heavyset_go 2y ago
> UI/UX: "Tool->GEGL Operation..." is too much friction for such a common operation- just pop it up when you click on the "FX" button in the layers window. You can make this a button in the toolbox in the settings.
nine_k 2y ago
GIMP is great software with sometimes less-than-great UX. I wonder if a project that replaces the "chrome" of GIMP with a different UX would be viable. Imagine a reworked menu / shortcut / dialog system that controls the unchanged core. Even better, imagine UI and UX to be live-tweakable, written in Python / Lua / Guile / you name it. That would make discovering better UI layouts and better UX flows absurdly easier. (Yes, as an Emacs user, I want more software to be like Emacs.)
- nomilk 2y ago
  I like your first idea (new UX layer over unchanged core) more than the second (fully customisable), although they're not mutually exclusive. An understated benefit of a consistent UI is if the user gets stuck and searches how to do XYZ, often an LLM or search engine will give an accurate answer as it's been answered before in forums etc. But if the UI changes every few months, there's often no answer.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    It's always the same trade-off between having a uniform experience and the ability to fix unfortunate decisions more easily. The UI default shipped should not materially (if any) change every few months. But power users should be able to tweak the UI and UX even more, and publish their tweaks. Some sets of tweaks might become popular among other power users, and the best finds could find their way upstream. What I strive to achieve is speeding up the process of UI evolution, of finding better approaches to UI and UX. This may be enabled by an ability to tweak UI/UX without recompiling the whole thing, and by not having to write the UI/UX in a low-level footgun-ridden language which is C. Even now GIMP allows for quite a bit of customization within its built-in UX. The untweaked, vanilla experience should be good enough, stable, and the norm for non-advanced users, very much like the current UX. For a battle-tested example, look at MS Office. You can tweak its UI in rather drastic ways; I've seen VBA apps that make Excel barely recognizable, while harnessing its power. But most users never ever alter a single button on a single toolbar, and are fine following video guides showing where to click.
  - wruza 2y ago
pjmlp 2y ago
* Drawing geometric shapes still requires dealing with paths, instead of having a pre-defined set of the most common ones, like in any other drawing program.
wruza 2y ago
I never made youtube thumbnails, but if I had to, I’d take 100 paint.nets and 0 gimps. Everything a youtube thumbnail ever needs can be easily done in a few minutes in paint.net. It’s like a standard toolbox for graphics. https://www.getpaint.net/download.html https://www.getpaint.net/download.html https://www.google.com/search?q=paint.net&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=paint.net&tbm=isch GIMP is almost designed to be passive aggressive and sometimes hostile to its user. Last year I had to regularly process some images in gimp on linux (cropping, composition, other basic ops) and seriously considered installing samba, qemu and windows only to share these pngs with paint.net. I can’t even fathom the pain of having to do something like a thumbnail in it.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  This hammer is really bad for working with screws. If you need something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_(software) use that. If you want something like krita, use that. And if you need something like gimp, paint.net is not even in consideration because it is decidedly something else
  - wruza 2y ago
    I tried all of that and they all just suck. E.g. neither pinta nor krita don’t show selection rectangle coords in the status bar. How the heck should I e.g. investigate screenshot-based automation fails with that? What makes paint.net stand out is that it is a pixel canvas tool with layers rather than an artistic canvas for soft brushes. And at the same time it has all its features easily accessible. I have also worked as a “designer” in a real typography for some time and know a thing or two about the process (not fully, but count me as sort of an insider). And I can tell you that gimp is only “an artist’s impression” of a graphical toolbox, and that artist is heavily drunk. If you need something like gimp and paint.net/etc isn’t enough, you need photoshop. Cause we’re talking about serious pre-print color management, etc. Gimp is two parts: very poor home graphics editor and very poor industrial graphics manager. Youtube thumbnails are paint.net 100%. I use that all the time for all my graphics, technical and creative, tried all others, and have no reason to switch, apart from OS requirements.
larodi 2y ago
Really weird that none of this is included as a screenshot or GIF in the release article - my opinion is that this matters a lot when you release a major version of a gfx package.
kapildev 2y ago
Is there not an alternative toImgur. It contains so much ads and other posts that I don't know which image I am looking at.

by geenat 2y ago

chirau 2y ago

May I ask a not so smart question... What is the big deal with thumbnails for YouTube videos. Like, I am always hearing about these thumbnails as if they can make or break a video/channels outcomes.

Conan_Kudo 2y ago
Because they can. The thumbnails are the first impression of a video, and if it isn't attention-grabbing, the video suffers.
danielheath 2y ago
At the end of a video, youtube shows thumbnails for several "suggested next videos". The thumbnail, video name and channel name are the only bits of information potential viewers see - if your thumbnail isn't good, they aren't even going to _start_ your video, let alone keep watching it.
- smohare 2y ago
  [dead]
xingped 2y ago
Think of it like a book cover. Regardless of a book's title or summary, an attractive (attracting? attention grabbing?) cover will get more people to click it. Also depending on where the thumbnail is displayed, you may not see the full video title, such as the grid after a video finishes playing.
- technion 2y ago
  I have tobwonder how many variations of "gaping mouths and shocked expressions" we can come up with.
  - smohare 2y ago
    [dead]
  - xingped 2y ago
    I do hate that style of thumbnail too. But hey, it just tells me not to click on the video. So it serves its purpose for me. But metrics I guess tell the youtubers that that thumbnail brings in lots of traffic. I think especially younger kids gravitate to it, unfortunately.
    - KetoManx64 2y ago
      https://dearrow.ajay.app/ https://dearrow.ajay.app/ will replace those thumbnails automatically for you
- dylan604 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the addage doesn't hold. You can pretty much judge the YT video by the cover.
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    I guess you’re in the minority of thinking people.
vunderba 2y ago
Though I haven't seen stats to back it up - I've heard from multiple sources that thumbnails which include a gigantic bobblehead of the author with a particularly exaggerated stupid looking expression on their face induce more people to click through. Even if it's for the sake of feeding the algorithm, I do my best to skip them. I also internally prioritize videos which: - avoid usage of superlatives "TOP X", "BEST OF Y" - have more than 5k views and less than 250k views. After a while, my YT recommendations have become mostly solid.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  It's called YouTube Face[1] and the fact that it works makes me weep for humanity. 1: https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-youtube-face https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-you...
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    > It's called YouTube Face[1] and the fact that it works makes me ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ) (fixed it for you)
  - araes 2y ago
    From looking at the link you posted, the immediate consideration, is it looks like they're all optimizing for a pornography face. Would not be very surprising based on the reputation of the internet.
- gblargg 2y ago
  I mostly skip videos with arrows in the thumbnails.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    PBS Space Time started doing it. Along with some clickbait/pull titles. I stopped watching.
    - abenga 2y ago
CyberDildonics 2y ago
Everyone knows you need the mouth open dumb face or the completely fake AI image for max brain rot which drives views and "engagement" (commenting on the fact that it's nonsense with people then defending the video as an authority as if it isn't stock footage with an AI voice reading a reddit comment).
- giuseppe_petri 2y ago
  I've been calling this concept "enragement". I'm sure I'm not the only one.
grandempire 2y ago
Mr Beast says he designs the thumbnail before making the video, then plans how to make a video to fit it.
- SunlitCat 2y ago
  That sounds kinda like first finding a name for a software project (or the final product) and then design the product around that name! :D
  - cl0ckt0wer 2y ago
    More like designing the storefront before designing the business.
    - speckx 2y ago
      Or getting a domain name before doing everything else.
  - grandempire 2y ago
    It does sound silly, but it also points to shallow nature of YouTube content. If you don’t have a good thumbnail it’s going to limit the success of your video because some percentage won’t click on it. It’s just how it goes.
loeg 2y ago
It's like a headline in visual form. The most attention-grabbing thumbnail gets the clicks.
phire 2y ago
You know how YouTubers are always talking about how "the algorithm" didn't like this video, or loves that video. Or that "the algorithm" is a huge black block which nobody knows how it works. Youtube's "the algorithm" will make or break both videos and channels. But "the algorithm" isn't really a mystery. At a basic level, it just shows a bunch of video recommendations to viewers, and measures if they click it or not (watch time, comments, likes also factor into the algorithm, but none of that matters if they don't click first). The higher the click-through rate, the more the video is pushed in recommendations. And the only things a viewer sees is the thumbnail, channel name, and video title. They have to decide which video they are going to watch based on just that. So really, a large chunk of "the algorithm" is just how appealing your thumbnail is to potential views.
- mrheosuper 2y ago
  not sure if this is good thing, but recently i've seen youtube recommend videos from very small channel(sub <10k)
  - dboreham 2y ago
    Like thread priority inversion.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I think there’s a randomized inclusion of new content just to see if anyone clicks it.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think the mystery is in the categorization of interests and user profiling. The click is central to the process, but the magic is getting your pie video in front of someone on a baking video binge, and not someone trying to to fix their oven.
- chaorace 2y ago
  There actually is an outcome worse than a missed click: if too many viewers are abandoning your video within the first few minutes (i.e. before midrolls), you'll experience substantial downranking. More or less, the art of making a successful video requires: * An attention-grabbing thumbnail * A curiosity-provoking title & premise * A strong hook which convinces the viewer to put the screen down and let it run * Editing which delivers the information at an engaging (yet monetizable) pace * Packaging said information so that it is intelligibly balanced across the mediums (audio/text/video) * ^^^ Doing this all in a style which still retains enough uniqueness to establish a repeat viewerbase "The algorithm" is a system for efficiently delivering novel videos with these qualities to the audiences who will most eagerly consume them, which is an essential function for a platform with 2 billion monthly users. For every video on lowest-common-denominator celebrity junk, there's a dozen niche videos tailored to some ravenous subculture or other. Not all magazines are tabloids... but just about anyone can kill time with a tabloid, so that's what leads. Unlike magazine stands, however, the platform will eventually learn to only show you the thumbnails for videos you'll want to finish watching. It's almost embarassing to share... but here's an example batch of 12 recommendations, almost all of which I'm likely to (eventually) click on and fully watch: https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png
bloqs 2y ago
Youtube content is driven heavily by children and sheltered people who are easily engaged with animalistic displays of expression and bright colors. I wish I was joking
- chris_wot 2y ago
  Hey, some of less unsheltered adults are swayed by it also!
- typeofhuman 2y ago
  Do YouTube engineers make great content, are they allowed to? I've interacted with Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitch engineers. But yet to with a YouTube engineer.
  - KetoManx64 2y ago
    Mostly videos about:getting chai lattes on the roof, 3 course meals from 4 star restraunts for lunch and yoga sessions in the early afternoon after a quick meeting with the manager. Aka "Average day in the life of a YouTube engineer"
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      those are produced by recruiting
      - all2 2y ago
        So I need a job on the recruiting team. Got it.
    - eru 2y ago
      Google food isn't actually all that great in most of their offices. Sydney, where I used to work for them, is pretty good; New York is decent. But I was rather underwhelmed by my visits to Mountain View.
      - 2y ago
DidYaWipe 2y ago
It's really embarrassing at this point. Even once-respectable content creators feel that they must now resort to absurd mugging in every thumbnail.
brudgers 2y ago
From my practical experience, they seem to make a difference in initial engagement which in turn makes a difference in algorithmic promotion which in turn makes a difference in overall “performance.” Tracking what you click on versus what you don’t, you might recognize that certain thumbnails make you more likely to take a pass. For clarity, my experience is at hobby scale and part of that hobby is learning about youtube. Trying to make the line go up is fun (until it isn’t) and a little attention to thumbnails seems to make the line go up.
JohnTHaller 2y ago
It's a smart question. It wouldn't seem to make much difference since you'd assume people would have channels they're subscribed to or search for something specific. Much of YouTube watch time is based on discovering new videos. And a big part of that is the thumbnail people see when they're looking at suggested content, related content, or search results. Colors, whether there are faces, fonts, images, etc all make a difference. And it varies over time and genre. YouTube has tools built in so you can A/B test different thumbnails and automatically select the better performing one. Note that I haven't done any of this myself except for making a couple thumbnails for personal videos. I was curious and watched a YouTube video about thumbnails and why they're important.
- ako 2y ago
  What capabilities was gimp missing to create these thumbnails?
numpad0 2y ago
I think there's a minor confusion going on here with respect to what constitutes a good YouTube thumbnail as well as what are good YouTube contents. Very few of channels I subscribe and watch, such as Forgotten Weapons, Technology Connections, Scott Manley, USCSB, CuriousMarc, media.ccc.de, etc. uses that open mouth YouTube face for their thumbnails, if they display a human face in a thumbnail at all. I would consider Doug Demuro videos to be embarrassingly deep into "typical YouTube stupidity" realm to admit watching, but even he tend to leave his mouth less than fully open. Do they not engineer their thumbnails to "appease the algorithm" - they do, by showing accurate and intriguing previews of what is to be presented, that for those channels often happens not to be an adult male human face with all orifices articulated to near or past mechanical limits, which, by the way, is an another one of optima. The statement "one can(not) judge a book by its cover" is not functionally equal to "books dipped longest in fluorescent yellow dye sell the most", at all. Apples and oranges both have their place.

kijin 2y ago

If it's a menu or toolbar and it mentions GEGL, it's wrong. GEGL is not something that end users should have to care about. Not to mention superfluous, since almost every fancy operation uses GEGL under the hood anyway.

glandium 2y ago

It always bothered me that some things were tucked away in "obscure" submenus, especially when the obscurity is an implementation detail. Really, it doesn't matter that GEGL operations are... GEGL operations.

nerdponx 2y ago
Isn't that the classic problem of software engineers also being responsible for UX? There's a reason UX is a whole field of its own.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Exactly this thread. I use Adobe suite of software, and I really don't even know what GEGL means. Nor should I need to know. Organize filters by function. Blur->radial/Gaussian,linear,etc. Noise->add/remove/etc. Designing the UI based on how the code a filter operates is cool for where the .cpp files live is not how the users think. Then again, a user of GIMP over other apps probably does filter that user into a more techy side of user than artistic side, so I'm probably eating a bowl of crow soon. Seems like maybe time for FOSS UIs to start a Fiverr account looking for UI/UX peeps.
  - brudgers 2y ago
    If you use Adobe, you’re not the prime design persona.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      I don't get the implication. I never claimed I was a designer. I'm a get shit done type of person. An operator if you will. Scariest thing you can show me is a Cmd-n blank sheet of paper. Give me content and a task, and it'll get done. Your assumption I'm a designer is just that, and I'm perfectly fine being an ass on my own and do not need your help
      - ChadNauseam 2y ago

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oblio 2y ago

Few people would associate "Gimp" and "simple UI/UX". It's been that way since I can remember, at least 20 years.

notpushkin 2y ago
I wouldn’t exactly, but some menus are more predictable (for me, at least) than in Photoshop etc. Filters are also more logically organized (or at least were before 3.0, I haven’t tried it yet but given the discussion around whatever the fuck GEGL operations are doesn’t give me a lot of hope)

moron4hire 2y ago

Yeah, be careful where you post that poster.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

WTF is a "GEGL" operation? I've been using (and have written) image-processing and -manipulation tools for decades, and I've never heard of such a thing.

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eco 2y ago
GEGL is just a library created to modernize GIMP's image manipulation pipeline. It forms a DAG of image operations. It's what unlocked non-destructive edits and porting everything over to it was a pretty massive undertaking (though it probably didn't need to take 20 years...) End users really don't need to know about it. Its exposure in the UI is likely just because a lot of stuff it can do isn't available yet in the traditional GIMP UI.
- code_biologist 2y ago
  I'm a data engineer so DAG/node systems in content creation software delights me (Blender, Resolve, Houdini). Terrible it's hidden behind the name "GEGL Operations". I'm exactly the person who will get it and love it immediately, but will never find it. Sounds like your parent commenter is the same. GIMP has always been a leader in UI self-owns.
  - stuaxo 2y ago
    I think they don't want to expose the name "GEGL" anywhere, now it's working would be the time to sort that out.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Yep. I learned to appreciate node-based systems in Shake. Just a great way to work.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  That is contradictory: "End users really don't need to know about it... a lot of stuff it can do isn't available yet in the traditional GIMP UI" So why "don't they need to know about it?" And regardless, putting a meaningless label on it is a user-hostile blunder. This blunder is not all that uncommon either. Affinity did it by burying a bunch of stuff under a menu item called "Studio." Not as bad as "GEGL", but still meaningless.

heavyset_go 2y ago

> UI/UX: "Tool->GEGL Operation..." is too much friction for such a common operation- just pop it up when you click on the "FX" button in the layers window. You can make this a button in the toolbox in the settings.

nine_k 2y ago

GIMP is great software with sometimes less-than-great UX. I wonder if a project that replaces the "chrome" of GIMP with a different UX would be viable. Imagine a reworked menu / shortcut / dialog system that controls the unchanged core. Even better, imagine UI and UX to be live-tweakable, written in Python / Lua / Guile / you name it. That would make discovering better UI layouts and better UX flows absurdly easier. (Yes, as an Emacs user, I want more software to be like Emacs.)

nomilk 2y ago
I like your first idea (new UX layer over unchanged core) more than the second (fully customisable), although they're not mutually exclusive. An understated benefit of a consistent UI is if the user gets stuck and searches how to do XYZ, often an LLM or search engine will give an accurate answer as it's been answered before in forums etc. But if the UI changes every few months, there's often no answer.
- nine_k 2y ago
  It's always the same trade-off between having a uniform experience and the ability to fix unfortunate decisions more easily. The UI default shipped should not materially (if any) change every few months. But power users should be able to tweak the UI and UX even more, and publish their tweaks. Some sets of tweaks might become popular among other power users, and the best finds could find their way upstream. What I strive to achieve is speeding up the process of UI evolution, of finding better approaches to UI and UX. This may be enabled by an ability to tweak UI/UX without recompiling the whole thing, and by not having to write the UI/UX in a low-level footgun-ridden language which is C. Even now GIMP allows for quite a bit of customization within its built-in UX. The untweaked, vanilla experience should be good enough, stable, and the norm for non-advanced users, very much like the current UX. For a battle-tested example, look at MS Office. You can tweak its UI in rather drastic ways; I've seen VBA apps that make Excel barely recognizable, while harnessing its power. But most users never ever alter a single button on a single toolbar, and are fine following video guides showing where to click.
- wruza 2y ago

pjmlp 2y ago

* Drawing geometric shapes still requires dealing with paths, instead of having a pre-defined set of the most common ones, like in any other drawing program.

wruza 2y ago

I never made youtube thumbnails, but if I had to, I’d take 100 paint.nets and 0 gimps. Everything a youtube thumbnail ever needs can be easily done in a few minutes in paint.net. It’s like a standard toolbox for graphics. https://www.getpaint.net/download.html https://www.getpaint.net/download.html https://www.google.com/search?q=paint.net&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=paint.net&tbm=isch GIMP is almost designed to be passive aggressive and sometimes hostile to its user. Last year I had to regularly process some images in gimp on linux (cropping, composition, other basic ops) and seriously considered installing samba, qemu and windows only to share these pngs with paint.net. I can’t even fathom the pain of having to do something like a thumbnail in it.

diffeomorphism 2y ago
This hammer is really bad for working with screws. If you need something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_(software) use that. If you want something like krita, use that. And if you need something like gimp, paint.net is not even in consideration because it is decidedly something else
- wruza 2y ago
  I tried all of that and they all just suck. E.g. neither pinta nor krita don’t show selection rectangle coords in the status bar. How the heck should I e.g. investigate screenshot-based automation fails with that? What makes paint.net stand out is that it is a pixel canvas tool with layers rather than an artistic canvas for soft brushes. And at the same time it has all its features easily accessible. I have also worked as a “designer” in a real typography for some time and know a thing or two about the process (not fully, but count me as sort of an insider). And I can tell you that gimp is only “an artist’s impression” of a graphical toolbox, and that artist is heavily drunk. If you need something like gimp and paint.net/etc isn’t enough, you need photoshop. Cause we’re talking about serious pre-print color management, etc. Gimp is two parts: very poor home graphics editor and very poor industrial graphics manager. Youtube thumbnails are paint.net 100%. I use that all the time for all my graphics, technical and creative, tried all others, and have no reason to switch, apart from OS requirements.

larodi 2y ago

Really weird that none of this is included as a screenshot or GIF in the release article - my opinion is that this matters a lot when you release a major version of a gfx package.

kapildev 2y ago

Is there not an alternative toImgur. It contains so much ads and other posts that I don't know which image I am looking at.