The developers of the GIMP graphic editor announced about work on a new image format that will replace the XCF format, which ensures the preservation of all data accompanying the work on the image, including information about layers, selected areas, channels and exposed guides. It is noted that the XCF format has a number of limitations and is not well suited for large or complex projects, such as multi-page and animated images, which are planned to be implemented in the GIMP 3.6 branch.
Instead of a strictly structured binary format, the new implementation, by analogy with OpenDocument, will use a set of files with XML markup, packed in a ZIP archive. Implementation details are still in development, but it is expected that the new format will speed up save operations, since periodic saving will only require changing parts of the file without having to overwrite the entire content, and will eliminate the complications that prevent the automatic save function from being implemented.
Support for the old XCF format will be retained for backward compatibility, but save and load functionality for new features will only be implemented in the new format, once it is finally stabilized.