2014-08-30 The Gimp uses the XCF file format. (The name comes from [0] ) To- day, I noticed a strange thing saving files in the Gimp. I saved to an NFS-mounted directory. Storing the XCF file took several minutes whereas exporting it as TIFF needed only a few seconds. (Both files were equally large: about 30MB.) It seemed as if the TIFF would be written sequentially in large chunks, but the XCF more in a random access order and with many tiny writes. I don't know if this is the case. I just wonder why the difference is this large. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXperimental_Computing_Facility http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke