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+--- Thread: Transparent Background Adds to Dimensions of Exported PNG (/Thread-Transparent-Background-Adds-to-Dimensions-of-Exported-PNG)
Transparent Background Adds to Dimensions of Exported PNG - Kramskry - 12-11-2025
Hi Everyone,
I have been trying to figure this out for 2 days, and have come up short, so I created an account to hopefully get some help. I am new to GIMP and have been using it to extract a little image from a larger image. I use Linux Mint Cinnamon.
I extracted the image, added an alpha layer, made the background transparent, and extracted my image as a PNG with the "save background color" option unchecked. The png properly shows only the image in the thumbnail of my file browser (no background), but when I right click on the file and view the properties it shows the total width x height of the file as including the transparent background from the canvas in GIMP. To illustrate, the image is roughly 360x350 pixels, but the total W x H is 1344x768.
The problem arises because I want to change the image size, but when I try to scale it GIMP scales based on the size of the canvas, not the size of the image. I found a workaround where I changed the Canvas Size to match roughly what the image is, so then when I use Scale Image my actual image is closer to what I want. There is still a small amount of error in this method because the whole canvas size is slighly bigger than my image.
Is there an an answer to my question? I spent so much time searching, but all I could find was people with problems of a background showing in their exported images and badly written ai articles outlining bare minimum basics. I went through the GIMP documentation, but I didn't see any mentioned regarding file dimensions and how they work when exporting with GIMP. To me, it seems like a transparent background would not be included in dimensions of a PNG because it does not exist. Maybe it does exist and the dimensional data is included in the file itself, but not rendered when used? I think I am fundamentally misunderstanding something.
Is the solution I came up with the best way to accomplish what I need?