i was just wondering if its possible to save your work in gimp and be able to come back and work on it later and have all your layers still open with out having to start all over...like say i was gonna make a picture and it was gonna take a while, maybe a couple days, could i save it as a animated file(gif) and then load it back up and still have all my layers with them all still being transparent..cause at times i don't have all that much time to go from start to finish. and then there's times when i'm not sure what else i want to do with a picture and want to wait til i get a better idea....

Yes. Or you can save it as xcf and all your layers, alpha, selections, paths etc etc will still be there for you.

cool thanks....

yes thats what the xcf file is for, but it doesnt save the history
i wonder why that is so

Because the history takes up too much space.
Files would be huge.

The XCF is Gimps native workspace file.

guessed so, but it would be a nice option if you could save the history as well

sometimes it would be handy

Don't use GIFs to save your work unless you need this specific format (GIF is lossy, if you're not drawing in 8bit mode).
Use .XCF !

...Also mentioning that (for 2.6, not sure for others) if you save your file without attributing it an extension, it automatically saves as xcf, I guess it's a kind of security, and one can also use it to "speed up" saving or show off laziness maybe