The Move Tool

Updated on: December 11, 2014

Hello and welcome to our video series on the Gimp. Now in this video, I'm gonna introduce you to the Move Tool and this is one of eight what they call Transform Tools. And the shortcut to get to this function is the letter M, as in "Mary", on your keyboard or you can just click on the icon. It don’t have a whole lot of options in our dialog box here to choose from.

move tool

We've got a few modes. One is Layer, which is one that I am familiar with and use. We've got another one called Selection and the other one is Path. And we can talk between these two items here --- "Pick a layer or guide" or "Move the active layer" which is one that I'm most familiar with and the one that I use.  Now to better demonstrate this, let me go ahead and add a third layer here so we can show you just the basic behind moving and we do that by just clicking on this icon here, create a new layer, and we're gonna name it yellow box if you will. And let's make this a little bit smaller.

text tool

Let's just say 50 pixels by 50 pixels. And there we have it. And this came up yellow because that was our foreground color. Now with this being selected, that's what's gonna be moving. Now if we select the blue, which is this here and you notice if you remember that it looks kinda purple because we adjust the opacity here.

move tool

That's the blue layer and I'm not sure exactly where it was but this is the one that is selected and we have our Move tool over here and it's going to move the selected layer. The Active Layer to time. Now if you do that by accident, just to let you know, hit your Control button and the letter Z in your keyboard and it puts it back right where it should be. So again, the active layer that is selected in our Layers dialog is what will be moved by using the Move tool. And this works pretty good. One of the functions that I use it mostly for is whenever I'm working on like an image, or a header, or an EBook cover. And I've got say some text that I just typed out and I want to center it or I want to bring it down to the bottom here because this is my copyright information. And we'll get into that in a later point when we cover the Textbox but that's just one function that we use the Move tool for. And that folks is the pretty quick introduction to the move tool, one of the first of the Transform tools we're gonna be getting into in this series of videos. Hope you learned something. Thank you much for watching and have a great day!

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