Gimp permission problems after Catalina upgrade

Maybe there is a problem with some apps that they needs gain permissions to write and read some critical folders in macOS Catalina like Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc. However, if you give total access to this apps for read and write inside your hard drive, the problem continues... But I only know one application that requested total access to my hard drive (CleanMyMac) in this case this app asked me about 2 times for permission but I don't remember exactly what kind of access this app asked.

This is great news. It appears my GIMP issues may be resolved if those thoughts hold true. Now if the other MacOS Catalina issues get worked out, I’ll probably re-initialize the Catalina upgrade an move back to it.

Gimp worked perfectly on Mojave, but after installing Catalina it will not save or export images Message appears saying desktop access denied. What is wrong ?

Same here for OmegaT. It works! Thank you Bradley Ross. Very helpful and easy to do it even for "non tech" people.

This version solves my problem. Thanks for this.

You don't have to move it to the desktop. It doesn't matter where the file is, a lot of programs don't have permission to READ from user-folders and the /var folder for instance. They seem to be able to write without a problem, it's the reading that is causing the prompt. So that does mean that you'll have to discard the prompt every time one of these programs (Inkscape, GIMP, MAMP are a few I came across) and you'll have to open files by right clicking from the finder program. You can't read directly from the programs, so the 'open' function there doesn't work either...

seems like apple is the only one that can fix this. It's definitely a Catalina problem. We now have to either ignore prompts (which is not an option for MAMP, that just fails) or use folders that are not in our user-folder trees, which makes everything a big mess...

You seem to have slightly different file names

What I did was cd/Applications/GIMP-2.10.app/Contents/MacOS

./gimp

BradleyRossMacBook:MacOS bradleyross$ ./gimp

2019-10-14 22:14:25.061 gimp-bin[53568:2295958] *** WARNING: Method userSpaceScaleFactor in class NSView is deprecated on 10.7 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use convertRectToBacking: instead. 

Cannot spawn a message bus without a machine-id: Unable to load /var/lib/dbus/machine-id or /etc/machine-id: Failed to open file “/var/lib/dbus/machine-id”: No such file or directory

(gimp-bin:53568): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 22:14:33.443: invalid cast from 'GtkMenuBar' to 'GtkWindow'

(gimp-bin:53568): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 22:14:33.443: gtk_window_add_accel_group: assertion 'GTK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'Display' -> 'GIMP built-in sRGB'

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'GIMP built-in sRGB' -> 'Display'

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'Display' -> 'GIMP built-in sRGB'

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'GIMP built-in sRGB' -> 'Display'

2019-10-14 22:16:54.585 file-png[53606:2297671] *** WARNING: Method userSpaceScaleFactor in class NSView is deprecated on 10.7 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use convertRectToBacking: instead. 

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'Display' -> 'GIMP built-in sRGB'

gimp_color_transform_new: using babl for 'Display' -> 'GIMP built-in sRGB'

void gimp_gegl_convert_color_profile(GeglBuffer *, const GeglRectangle *, GimpColorProfile *, GeglBuffer *, const GeglRectangle *, GimpColorProfile *, GimpColorRenderingIntent, gboolean, GimpProgress *): converting buffer took 0.0253 seconds

... ... ....

I assume that MacOS/gimp is a shim program written in Objective-C. Does this sound right? When running the application in this manner, I think that it using the file permissions for the terminal rather than the GIMP application. Does this make sense to anyone who is more familiar with the code. Perhaps the Objective-C programs in the MacOS directory need to be updated?

10-15-2019

GIMP 2.8. and Catalina 10.15

I found my solution(s) until Apple and Gimp can work this out.

1 - A workaround for the meantime is by using the terminal - You need to do this everytime you want to use Gimp

$ cd /Applications/Gimp.app

$ ./Contents/MacOS/Gimp

2 - Another workaround is, I simply dragged my Gimp work folder 'MyGimpWorkFolder', located on the Desktop, to my HardDrive (Macintosh HD) under USERS - MACINTOSH HD/USERS/name_of_user/MyGimpWorkFolder

A - LAUNCH GIMP

B - In Gimp - OPEN FILE - Now, instead of opening the Desktop and getting the dreaded 'Could not read the contents of Desktop' (this is where my Gimp work folder was)  OPEN the name_of_user and folder name

C - This will now work everytime when you launch Gimp instead of using the Terminal workaround

10-15-2019

GIMP 2.8. and Catalina 10.15

I found my solution(s) until Apple and Gimp can work this out.

1 - A workaround for the meantime is by using the terminal - You need to do this everytime you want to use Gimp

$ cd /Applications/Gimp.app

$ ./Contents/MacOS/Gimp

2 - Another workaround is, I simply dragged my Gimp work folder 'MyGimpWorkFolder', located on the Desktop, to my HardDrive (Macintosh HD) under USERS - MACINTOSH HD/USERS/name_of_user/MyGimpWorkFolder

A - LAUNCH GIMP

B - In Gimp - OPEN FILE - Now, instead of opening the Desktop and getting the dreaded 'Could not read the contents of Desktop' (this is where my Gimp work folder was)  OPEN the name_of_user and folder name

C - This will now work everytime when you launch Gimp instead of using the Terminal workaround

I haven't figured this one out yet. Upgrade 10.15 on both iMac and macBook. macBook NOW allows access to Documents folder when running Gimp from launcher, BUT iMac still complains about "Operation not permitted". Huh?

I've temporarily solved this by accessing the desktop (and other folders) via the terminal, and then starting Gimp manually from the terminal (it seems that Gimp inherits the permissions from the parent process). It's cumbersome, but it works.

Start terminal (or iTerm like I use)

$ cd ~/Desktop

This will open a dialogue asking if you want to give Terminal permissions to access the desktop. Do this for every folder you want to access.

Then do

$ /Applications/GIMP.app/Contents/MacOS/Gimp

same problem for other apps that use that widget toolkit (Synfig for example). It doesn't get fixed even if you give it full disk access.