You know, I loose track sometime … To avoid that problem, I try to name the layers with explicit names, but it become hairy when you have more than 10 of those.
I would really welcome the layers group planed for future gimp release, So we are gonna be hable to collapse entire group of layers to focus just in the part currently edited.
If you really want to be scared, look at http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/2008-09-22SneakPreview/ There Bert Monroy tell that the piece Hi’s showing at the beginning have 15000 layers !!!!!

Philippe : On Linux at least, if you install DMenu, it’s pretty easy to make a ‘quick-jump-to-layer’ command so you can type a fragment of a layer’s name to find it.

the main code required would be like this:

import os
_input, _output = os.popen2(‘dmenu -p “Select Layer: “‘)
layerlist = ‘\n’.join ([layer.name for layer in image.layers])
_input.write(layerlist)
result = _output.read()
for layer in image.layers:
if layer.name == result:
image.active_layer = layer

I agree that we need better ability to ignore irrelevant layers.. I think layer groups will only improve this somewhat. We really need a search functionality.. like we have in the file-selection dialog.
If we could trigger it that kind of search with ‘/’, that should be quite convenient for most people.. and then if we could generalize that to the other types of named data like brushes, patterns, channels and paths, I think we could work quite a lot faster

re: Bert Monroy stuff .. wow!
I had seen that rail station image before, somewhere.. But it is fascinating to hear about the ridiculous level of detail in his work.

I wonder how much RAM he has in his computer .. probably more than a couple GB, eh?

And Philippe, I wonder if you have a tablet like his? That probably cost more than my computer.

..jim

I am glad you pointed to GIMPressionist. That can be a very convenient texture too.