Cannot drag and drop into Snap installed GIMP

[florin]

I am trying to use snap apps as much as possible because of the advantages, mainly the non -overlapping packages item, but right now I got into something that I expect to work, but it does not: drag and dropping into GIMP.

See the attached screenshot to get the error message I got in GIMP and the path in the ksysguard, to make sure it is a snap piece of software.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: snapd 2.35.5+18.10
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-10.11-generic 4.18.12
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-10-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu13
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue Oct 23 20:24:12 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-10-19 (3 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" - Release amd64 (20181017.3)
SourcePackage: snapd
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

you need to connect the removable-media interface (for security reasons this interface is not auto-connected), either by going to the software center, finding gimp in there and clicking the "Permissions" button where you then can allow access to "removable storage devices" or via the command line with:

sudo snap connect gimp:removable-media

after this you should be able to also drag and drop files from your external disks.

[florin (florin-arjocu)]

It works, thank you. But..

But the thing is that on Android, the other place where most of us need to set permissions for an app, we get the OS popping some window and saying that the app needs some permission to work properly. This can be asked at the moment when the app tries to access some resource it cannot access. The firewalls I used do the same, they detect some software connecting to some port and they ask the user what to do: allow or do not allow (remember answer, ignore, etc.).

This would be nice to have in Ubuntu, too.

Meanwhile, thank you.
PS: Not knowing this, I had to install the GIMP PPA for having the latest version, so I have 2 versions now, the one from PPA and the one from Snapstore. Is there some way to know which is which when starting them? Thanks.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

i think the "popup a permissions window" thingie is on the roadmap, but it might still take a while ...

to my knowledge there is no way in the GUI to tell the installed versions apart if they ship the same icon (which both gimp installs you have most likely do). but if you start it from a terminal you can start the snap via "snap run gimp" or through /snap/bin/gimp, while just a simple "gimp" should start the PPA version (i'd personally stick with one version though and just remove the one i do not regulary use).

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

The prompting mechanism is indeed on the roadmap but we don't have the required kernel components yet (apparmor prompting) so there's nothing we can do in snapd yet.