Hey guys, I’ve been wondering in which other software, open or closed the Krita file format is currently supported or could be potentially supported.
I just figured why not list everything we know works OR ask developers of certain projects about Krita support.
I’ve asked these projects for a .kra Support:
1.) Quicklook (a program that creates the kind of “spacebar” preview like on a mac, but on windows) and haven’t heard anything from them yet, but it is just minutes ago. I have also set this up to work in total commander, which is really nice to have. Windows really needed a better preview for a long time now.
2.) Eagle (a bit like the Adobe Bridge, but on steroids with all the organizing options). They happily consider .kra and .ora and the support gave it further down the line to the developers, they think about an implementation, I think they just need to see more people using Krita, so it comes naturally. Could take a while tho, they have a lot on their roadmap already.
Here 2 open source software on which there’s a support of .kra file (ie: use the merged preview png file, it’s not a full support, especially for animation…)
The .ora and .kra file are zip files, and they’ll find in archive’s root a merged png file that can be directly used. Don’t know how they’re working and how the code is organized, but I think development cost is 1md, maybe 2
Thanks! Yeah I asked here because mostly the developers would probably know because they know a lot of what is going on behind the scenes.
Yes, I think Halla mentioned it here somewhere. I told them that. Let’s just hope they include it. My personal take on “industry acceptance” is partly that it can’t harm Krita to be seen in as many other tools as possible, every mention of Krita helps get more people onboard, more funding, more good.
This software will create a large number of fragmented and small files, which is not good for the hard disk. I once bought this software, and then sold it to someone else at 2/3 of the price.
I now use digikam to store and manage pictures. In my image, it can open kra. Because it also belongs to kde
I absolutely agree! It opens the psd very quickly, which makes me very greedy. Hope kra can also have this support
Only for viewing there is XN-ViewMP, available for Linux, Mac & Windows. It is free for personal use and claims to open more than 500 file-formats - KRA-files are not listed under those supported files but will be viewed, at least under Windows.
*.KRA-files can only be viewed, *.ORA-files are NOT supported!
The old XN-View without the MP-extension also can NOT open *-KRA-files.
Maybe it would be an idea to develop a plugin that is able to open and save KRA files to give image viewers like XNView, IrfanView and others access to this format and make it more popular this way?
Possibly after the completion of Krita 5 capacities for such a project are free? I myself am not a programmer, I lack the skills to implement something like this.
Well, .kra is supposed to be an internal file format. I know that with what happened to .psd nobody cares about such things anymore but if we talk about integration (with things that are not just image viewers), we should be talking about something more like .ora, which is supposed to be an interchangeable format. I know .ora is limited for now, but that’s why we need to work on it an extend it further, if it’s needed.
The developers of any application that you ask for support will be much more happy supporting .ora than .kra, too.
For the image viewers or file browsers… I dunno, for example on Cinnamon I just added a file that makes pretty thumbnails for every .kra file, it only needed an addition to configuration. It would be great if it was done by default, but it’s fine too.
I also asked for *.ora, at least the Eagle support. It’s a shame that everyone and their grandmother kinda supports PSD but not the open formats. It is beyond me as they are completely transparent and don’t have to be reverse engineered. I guess we need to hope that just more people start using *.ora.
I am a big fan of XnView and I know that Pierre, the developer, is very open to suggestions and gladly implement new features and functions if requested. Not everything of course, but it is very likely he’d consider .kra for XnView.
I also want .ora to improve. I feel that will have to wait until GIMP 3.2 even though it is better to have improvements now. @InkLab is the go-to person for discussion of ora improvements.
There was a feature request for GIMP to support exporting .kra files. The concern seems to be that the .kra file format is not fully documented publicly, so internal changes could be made that would break any exporter (e.g. a layers file is largely text and binary data, but as far as I can tell, there’s not a specification for what the binary title data should be once it’s decompressed).
I put together a plug-in (based on their .ora plug-in) that imports .kra files into GIMP using the mergedimage.png and preview.png. Before I submitted it to them, I wanted to ask if there are plans to publish a .kra specification (or if it’s there and I just missed). From what I’ve read, I think the answer is “use .ora instead” (haha), but I did want to confirm first.
but if we talk about integration (with things that are not just image viewers), we should be talking about something more like 
