Why grouped layers of Gimp are becoming single layer in Adobe Photoshop after conversion?

Question

Recently I was creating a layout of a webpage using GIMP and as it contained many layers, so I grouped them into sections as per the page so that I could manage the layers properly, but when I converted the file into PSD format(as per the requirement of the developer), each group of my design turned into a single layer.

I tried to find out why this happened but could not find a relevant answer for this so I am sharing it here. I hope I will get the solution. I also want to know that, is there any way to convert GIMP files(especially with grouped layers) to psd without losing the groups. Or is there any other file extension which work fine on both GIMP and Adobe Photoshop without any loss.

Answer 1

It happens because of the following bug in GIMP'S PSD format plug-in: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705895

Layer groups are a more recent addition than many of the file format plug-ins, so missing support like this is discovered occasionally.

It will most likely not be that hard to add support for layer groups in this case, required skills are the ability to build GIMP from source and coding in C, the relevant API on GIMP's side and the structure in the PSD file can be gathered from the developer docs and file format specification.