XCF, short for ''

eXperimental Computing Facility Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility and the C ...

'', is the native image format of the

GIMP Gimp or GIMP may refer to: Clothing * Bondage suit, also called a gimp suit, a type of suit used in BDSM * Bondage mask, also called a gimp mask, often worn in conjunction with a gimp suit Embroidery and crafts * Gimp (thread), an ornamental tr ...

image-editing program. It saves all of the data the program handles related to the image, including, among others, each layer, the current selection, channels, transparency, paths and guides. Prior to version 4 (GIMP 2.10.0, released on 2018-04-27), the saved image data are compressed only by a simple RLE algorithm, but GIMP supports compressed files, using

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and ...

bzip2 bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities such as tar for tasks such as handli ...

, or xz. The compressed files can be opened as normal image files. Since version 4, the image data can be compressed by

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...

instead. The XCF file format is

backward compatible In telecommunications and computing, backward compatibility (or backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, software, real-world product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with inpu ...

(all versions of GIMP can open earlier versions' files) and in some cases,

forward compatible Forward compatibility or upward compatibility is a design characteristic that allows a system to accept input intended for a later version of itself. The concept can be applied to entire systems, electrical interfaces, telecommunication signal ...

. For example, GIMP 2.0 can save text in text layers while GIMP 1.2 cannot. Text layers saved in GIMP 2.0 will open as ordinary image layers in GIMP 1.2. However, XCF files containing layer groups, a feature introduced in GIMP 2.7, cannot be opened with GIMP 2.6. Despite some use in other programs (see §software support), the use of XCF as a data interchange format is not recommended by the developers of GIMP, since the format reflects GIMP's internal data structures and there may be minor format changes in future versions. Instead, a collaborative effort between the developers of GIMP and

Krita Krita ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. Originally created for Linux, the software also runs on Windows, macOS, Haiku (operating system), Hai ...

is underway to design a standardised raster file format called OpenRaster (modelled on the

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300, is an open file format for word processor, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Presentation program, presentations and ...

format) for future use in both applications, and likely in others also. GIMP's ''Save'' dialog saves in the XCF format: starting with version 2.8, other formats with import/export support were moved to an ''Export'' dialog.

Software support

A partial list of image viewers and

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software.

References

External links

Documentation of the XCF File Format
{{DEFAULTSORT:xcf (file format) Graphics file formats