Layered PNGs in GIMP

Posted 21:16, on 6/5/2008 in Ubuntu

I quite often receive website creative supplied in PNG format, particularly from our main designer who uses Macromedia Fireworks. Fireworks saves these by default with layers, which can be useful when converting layouts into HTML/CSS, but I never understood why these layers were gone when I opened the file in the GIMP.

It turns out, the reason is because the PNG format doesn't support layers! The PNG spec does allow files to contain some 'extra data', which is apparently where Macromedia stores the layer information (in an apparently closed format nothing else can read). So much for the 'portable' network graphics format.

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