I used to be a GIMPShop user for years. GIMPShop, as the name already suggest, is the tweaked version of GIMP to behave like Photoshop. It’s just the temporarily hacked one, doesn’t intend to be separate software project. But it’s good enough for me who just want to crop and add text label to my screenshot.

The problem came up when I bought a new MacBook Air with pre-installed Leopard. GIMPShop didn’t show up as in Tiger. After Googling for a while, I found that GIMPShop is not compatible with Leopard and the author said he won’t update it anymore.

Fortunately, someone at Wilber loves Apple provides the GIMP Mac package. Furthermore, it’s new GIMP 2.4 branch with loads of new features. However, since it’s not the official and fully-tested version, some bugs remain and installation process is a bit tricky.

Follow these steps if you want to use GIMP on Leopard.

1. Install X11 from Leopard DVD disc 1
2. Download and install XQuartz package from here. Important: Use XQuartz 2.1.2 instead since 2.1.4 is buggy.
3. XQuartz installation requires restart. Do it once.
4. Download and install GIMP package from Wilber loves Apple.
5. Start the GIMP. The first run is a bit slow, be patient.

After using GIMP 2.4 for a while, it’s very welcome improvement. New interface is cleaner and some more features are added.

Update Since GIMP 2.4 brought us new way of select-and-move and Mac version seems not recognise the Alt key (need to use in combination with Ctrl to move selection). The workaround is to ‘Select Float’ from menu instead.