Building GIMP for macOS

The main GIMP building instructions are at Building GIMP . This page is for macOS-specific additions.

Supported macOS/OSX API

The supported versions of OSX and macOS are noted in the devel-docs/os-support.txt file in the respective branches:

• OS support for GIMP 2.10 (stable branch)
• OS support for GIMP 2.99 (development branch)

GIMP project is favoring backward compatibility as a general rule and we really don’t like deprecating hardware when it is just a few years old. Nevertheless we may have to bump our macOS requirement when it becomes too hard to maintain. This is especially true as this OS has extremely low contribution rate while core system changes happen at nearly each macOS release. Sometimes, lowering compatibility with old versions is the only way to reduce hardship for the few contributor(s) we have.

Therefore if you find the minimum supported macOS version too high, the best solution would be to contribute.

Current procedure

GIMP has an official build whose scripts are located at this repo: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/gimp-macos-build

Note that this procedure allows to build for x86-64-based machines, but also for the newest ARM-based machines (Apple Silicon, a.k.a. M1, M2…).