GIMP on MS Store now requires Windows Build 20348

We received some informal reports in the Microsoft Store reviews telling us that GIMP updates were deleting user data! In particular, plug-ins, themes, brushes, user settings and other add-ons were not being kept during an update from the store.

To resolve this, the updated version of GIMP from the Microsoft Store will require Windows 11 or at least Windows Server 2022 (Windows NT Build 10.0.20348.0).

Windows 10 is still supported, but only when GIMP is installed from our .exe installer.

Note that we are no longer able to support versions of Windows older than Windows 10, and can no longer support 32-bit systems running Windows.

Installing the update will prevent future data loss during upgrades.

Technical details¶

This was being caused by the way MSIX (the format of apps distributed on Microsoft Store, GIMP included) is designed, which prefers sandboxed user data (like Flatpak and Snap). We have been trying to work with this requirement when running from MSIX, but were not successful.

So, to fix this packaging limitation, we were given the special “restricted capability” unvirtualizedResources (specifically virtualization:ExcludedDirectory), to preserve user data on %AppData%\GIMP, just as the .exe installer does. This is similar to what we do on other sandbox distributions such as Flatpak and Snap.

After the update, GIMP user data will be copied on upgrades.

The update does not affect images or other resources stored outside your GIMP folder.

How to migrate the previous user data¶

This restricted capability is only available on Windows NT Build 10.0.20348.0 and later. So, users with older Windows versions will need to use the .exe installer.

Note: the binaries inside the.exe installer and the .msix are exactly the same.

For users who were using the MS Store version until now and are switching to the .exe installer, here are instructions in order not to lose your configuration data from the MS Store version:

1. Manually locate your config dir at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\ (you may just copy-paste this string into the Windows Explorer).
2. Search a folder starting with GIMP (with random numbers and letters after that) at this location.
3. From there, navigating down to LocalCache\Roaming\ where you will find a folder named GIMP.
4. Copy this GIMP folder into %APPDATA% (again, just copy-paste %APPDATA% into the Windows Explorer to find the correct location). Note that maybe the folder %APPDATA%\GIMP\ already exists, in particular if you also used the .exe installer at some point. If so, it is up to you to decide whether you want to override the data already present with the ones from the MS Store GIMP.

This procedure is a one-time thing as a workaround to this exceptional issue. You won’t have to do it again in the future!