It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

• Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
• Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
• Full Alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities
• Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
• Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters