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AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea
- Jyaif 6y agoHe estimates that he's missing out on 10% to 40% of revenue due to ad blockers.
- C19is20 6y agoOr from people who won't purchase anyway. If I need something, I'll look it up. "Suggesting" I purchase something just doesn't work for me. Ads are blocked on my machines primarily for aesthetics, then lack of use.
- comprev 6y agoHe'll still get ad display revenue even if the viewers don't purchase anything.
- raspasov 6y agoA lot of people talking about the revenue (no issue with that). I wonder about the implementation. How is this done? Feels performant from my limited testing. I see that it uses WebGL but would love to know more details.
- IvanK_net 6y agoI gave a talk about it two years ago :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
- mlok 6y agoThank you, Photopea looks amazing (even on mobile!) I'll certainly try it in the future. This success is inspiring and your talk is very interesting. Do you intend to make sqzr.js available to others ?
- raspasov 6y agoThank you! Will definitely watch it!
- bckr 6y agoIvan I just want to say that you are so incredibly generous in your comments, your attitude, everything. You're inspiring! Thank you!
- indysigners 6y agoPhotopea is super easy to use and I’m using it almost every day, despite having a fully licensed PS 2021 version installed on my iMac. Photoshop is just way to slow compared to Photopea. So it’s both easier to use and much faster than the original. Kudos to Ivan for this!
- IvanK_net 6y agoThanks a lot! Photopea can do many things other editors can not do, e.g. opening a PDF in a PSD way (with editable text layers, vector shapes, clipping masks, bitmaps as smart objects etc.). You can also use it to convert Gimp, Sketch, Figma, SVG and other formats to layered PSDs.
- hypertexthero 6y agoThank you for making Photopea, and thank you for keeping the keyboard shortcuts as they are in Photoshop!
- junon 6y agoLove the site but they're incredibly hostile toward those with ad blockers. So no wonder they make so much.
- paulcole 6y agoIt’s an ad-supported business. What do you want them to do for people who use ad blockers, roll out the red carpet?
- yosito 6y agoI just tested it out with uMatrix and uBlock Origin in Firefox and it works fine. I wonder what ad blockers you were using that made you think it was "incredibly hostile"? I only work on Photoshop files once a year or so, but next time I do, I'll gladly pay to support the ad-free version of the app.
- junon 6y agouBlock origin, and it causes a pop-up to appear every 30 seconds. Are you saying I'm lying?
- underwater 6y agoThat sounds like a lot, but ads on Photopea are pretty disruptive. They take up a significant portion of the screen in an app where having enough space to see everything is a real problem.
- Normille 6y agoStylebot [or similar]: .app > div:first-child { min-width: 99vw; } .panelblock.mainblock { flex: 1; }
- jart 6y agoI saw lots ads from Adobe pop up. Can anyone help me understand why Adobe is funding a guy in the Czech Republic to give away for free a pixel perfect closed source clone of their flagship product? I also can't find the privacy policy.
- tehlike 6y agoThey are probably stealing users from photopea instead
- Rhedox 6y agoThey're probably just buying ads from something like Google Adsense without knowing where they'll be displayed.
- cblconfederate 6y agoWell that makes for a tough choice: should i pay $240/year for photoshop or $40 for pp to get rid of ads
- shawnz 6y ago"Enjoying this product? Try the real thing"
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- xupybd 6y agoWow that's a slick app for a one man band.
- SuchAnonMuchWow 6y agoneeds a (2020) in the title
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- tonyedgecombe 6y agoHe does seem to offer premium accounts.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI am very impressed. More featured than Gimp and Krita in some ways.
- johnchristopher 6y agoFor me it's about how it comes closer to how I used Photoshop than I can with Krita or Gimp. But neither Krita nor Gimp are supposed to be drop-in replacements for Photoshop anyway so that's okay.
- tomcooks 6y agoNot having to install Gimp nor Krita is great, given all the disk space they occupy. As an added bonus with Photopea I have to relearn GUI patterns nor shortcuts, I can apply what I've learned in years of PS usage. This is an opportunity for FOSS, if the objective is to increase adoption from casual users. I wonder if the GIMP version that was made to look like PS is still a thing
- rijoja 6y agoThe deb package for GIMP is like what 20MB? I won't count dependencies such as GTK here since they really wouldn't exist without the GIMP project.
- seba_dos1 6y agoWhen uncompressed and unpacked, GIMP is 112.25 MiB and Krita is 189.45 MiB on Arch. Which doesn't seem like a lot to me these days given their feature set, bundled stuff etc.
- tomcooks 6y agoMeanwhile I can do without, by using my browser. What doesn't seem a lot to you in terms of resources and space is a blessing to those with more limited means.
- 6y ago
- young_unixer 6y ago> With a full time job as full stack developer at a good company he would have done a lot more. The guy is good, at a FANG he would earn 200+ guaranteed and a pension plan. I don't want to attack this comment in particular, specially because they're saying this to simply support the argument that the guy is an excellent programmer, but it irks me when people say stuff this assuming that an excellent programmer always has easy access to a FAANG. Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG, some people are either too young or too old to be a good candidate, and a myriad other things that could get in the way of an excellent programmer. In such scenarios, an Internet business like this is the only way out for some programmers. I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
- high_byte 6y agomy issue is with that comment assuming Photopea is full-time job. maybe it is idk, but maybe it isn't and he can still work a day job and this is a side business. regardless of FAANG ofc.
- sildur 6y ago> Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG Some other people would consider morally reprehensible to be accomplices of FAANG. I wouldn't work for them even if I could. It would be like working for Fox News.
- elric 6y agoI don't know what it's like in other countries, but here in Belgium, if you want compensation that is anywhere near FAANG levels, you have to go the freelance route and charge high day rates. Then we'd have to be talking rates of 1000eur/day or more, which is extremely rare. And if you didn't incorporate, you'll be taking home less than 500eur/day. Which is still three times more than what the average SE employee gets to take home. But it's a far cry from US FAANG levels.
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- macando 6y agoI used it a few times for some quick photo edits. Along with Figma one of the brightest examples of how browser apps can be slick, performant and powerful.
- urbandw311er 6y agoAnyone able to explain how Adobe never took legal action against this product? I always thought that the UI was so similar as to be over the line in terms of copycat. But then IANAL so perhaps that’s legal.
- wideareanetwork 6y agoCopying look and feel of software was fought out in the courts by Apple and Microsoft a very long time ago. It’s allowed.
- Ciantic 6y agoHow about in Czech Republic, or EU courts? There is always a way for big companies to fight small ones. Of course one way to defend that would be to have the company be US based or with founding US partners.
- rijoja 6y agoUsually by buying them. If not that by hiring 10x the amounts of the coders and copy whatever that did and then launch a massive PR campaign.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoThey could try to bog down photopea in permanent lawsuits, but that would risk some EFF-style organization taking the other side, and now they're fighting an equal opponent, earning a lot of bad PR, and most importantly, they're providing a lot of cheap advertising for the competing product while also making themselves unpopular.
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- busymom0 6y agoThe developer answered similar questions on this reddit AMA: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/e96gzvm/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
- busymom0 6y agoThe developer did a AMA 2 years ago which covers a lot of questions posted on this post (from 8 months ago): https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_... > I was contacted by one of developers of Adobe XD, to coordinate me about the development of the XD format (which is very new and still in development, but I implemented it into Photopea). I am trying to compete with all photo editors, but Adobe Photoshop is the most popular one today (that is why I worked so hard on supporting PSD files). I have used Photopea for about 2 years now after I got introduced to it from the reddit AMA. Used to use Photoshop for created App Store screenshots for my app, then I upgraded my Mac and my old Photoshop wasn't supported on the new MacOS (64 bit stuff if I remember right) and I didn't want to shell money on a new license. Photopea was a convenient choice considering I don't have to install anything on my Mac plus it loads much faster (if browser caches) than Photoshop itself. Few examples of the App Store screenshots for my Hacker News app HACK: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer/id1464477788#?platform=iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
- Ciantic 6y agoI have used Photopea somewhat, but I have thought this is temporary as it's not open source. How long this will be available? If Adobe targets this, it wouldn't be a surprising to see this being bought off and killed.
- fendy3002 6y agoUnfortunately, it won't be easy to defend lawsuit from adobe. I don't see how it'll survive unless Microsoft or Facebook buy it.
- IvanK_net 6y agoHi, I am the creator of Photopea :) Photopea exists since 2013. 1. Nobody can buy Photopea, if I refuse to sell it. 2. I am not aware of using a work of someone else, or a unique idea of someone else. I would not be able to live in a world, where I am constantly scared, that someone more powerful can put me in jail, just because they have more money for lawyers. I hope our world is not like that, and if it is, I am ready to fight to change it.
- jart 6y agoNice work Ivan. Have you considered the following? 1. Putting ads in an iframe hosted on a separate origin. 2. Posting a privacy policy.
- IvanK_net 6y agoAll ad providers today do not allow showing ads in iframes. You can find our privacy policy by going to https://www.Photopea.com https://www.Photopea.com , clicking "Account" at the top, and then, clicking "Terms of Service".
- jart 6y agoThank you for your answer. I wasn't aware all ad platforms today had that requirement.
- trinovantes 6y agoThe only thing that baffles me is how he was be able to get his adsense account approved. Anytime I try to apply for one for one of my SPA web apps, I get declined due to "lack of content".
- jamescontrol 6y agoMy guess is that if you have enough traffic, they will probably bend the requirements.
- cblconfederate 6y agoIt's also that they've become a lot more strict on that rule over the years (which doesn't even make sense, since google doesn't do contextual ads anymore)
- FounderBurr 6y agoIf it’s free it wouldn’t be crippled with ads.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI think the most amazing is that it s made with pure javascript , no need to learn any frameworks and the myriad of things around them. Maybe even i do know javascript after all...
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- shajid 6y agoI use Photopea a lot and the amount of Photoshop features it has is astounding. Like adjustment layers, smart objects etc. The PSDs it exports work nicely with the Photoshop I have in my Windows PC. This is just mind-blowing. That brings me to a question I have. GIMP has been in development for longer time. And supposedly it has a bigger team behind it. So how come GIMP is missing a lot of nice features like non-destructive editing, layer styles etc? I saw some of these features in its roadmap, but why is its development so slow? Is it only because working on GIMP doesn't generate any money? Edit: rephrase
- jokethrowaway 6y agoGIMP is OSS and doesn't pay the bills. I'm sure much more man-hours went into Photopea (even with a single contributor) than in GIMP and the [ad revenue / promise of passive income] is what allowed that.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoI suspect a lot more work went into GIMP, but a) the overhead of many small contributors ate a lot of it, b) the overhead of an ancient code base, having to interface with OS level GUI libraries etc. ate a lot more c) GIMP got a lot of development for features but not enough UX work. Totally agree that the ads paying the bills is what enabled Photopea to become so good in the end.
- cblconfederate 6y agoHighly unlikely. Just the work on upgrades to newer versions of libraries should be more man-hours than what a single guy can achieve
- k__ 6y agoWeb apps I use for my job on a regular basis: - AWS Cloud9 (IDE) - Google Docs (Office Suite) - Gravit Designer (Vector editor) - Photopea (Photo editor) - Google Mail What are your favorite web apps?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoVS Code is, de facto, a web app, and I've seen well-working browser versions of it.
- danybittel 6y agodraw.io
- petepete 6y ago- Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/) It's rather good.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI was just thinking why there isnt a place to find those apps.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoWhat I find more amazing is what an incredible equalizer IT is: An individual with nothing more than a computer (and $50 worth of rented production infrastructure) plus the right skills can build a project that makes a (well-deserved) million a year, from anywhere in the world. It also shows the power of smart design and keeping as much as you can client side. Attempting to move any of the actual work to the server side would create an unsustainable amount of a) additional development work, b) infrastructure cost, c) infrastructure operations work. It's also a great example that you truly can do everything inside a browser nowadays. Regarding the incredulous people who can't imagine how 12 TB/month cost only $50, the hosting provider may be taking a small loss on it, and make it up with other customers. At Hetzner, extra bandwidth (after you've exhausted your included allocation) retails for 1 EUR/TB + VAT. A provider can afford to lose $10-20/month on a single customer, and kicking them out is probably not worth the effort and the risk of even the smallest amount of bad press/word-of-mouth.
- yosito 6y agoIt's the "plus the right skills" part that makes it not actually an equalizer. No one is born with the skills to write amazing software. It takes a lot of hard work to learn those skills, and in order to do that hard work you need to have the available time and resources both to study/practice and to meet your material needs (and the material needs of anyone who depends on you) in the meantime. Not to mention that it's not just the skill of programming, there are a hundred other prerequisite skills that can't be taken for granted either, a big one of which is language skills. If English isn't your first language, you're starting way behind.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoYes, you need free time, and either having English skills, learning English skills, or knowing another language that has good documentation is important. But it's still a far shot from needing a tens of millions of dollars to build a factory, or even tens of thousands to buy some basic equipment for some smaller business that doesn't have the potential to get anywhere nearly as big.
- 6y ago
- jfrunyon 6y ago"the free alternative to Photoshop" Something tells me I'm by far not the only one who has heard of Photoshop, and GIMP, but not Photopea.
- bambax 6y agoHe says somewhere that 20-25% of users of Photopea are from India. This sounded surprising, and then I remembered that so many photo-editing services are based in India (search for "photo clipping service" for instance). Many of them probably use Photopea, a much cheaper alternative to buying huge numbers of CC subscriptions... There is something hilarious in the fact that image editing farms in India, whose clients come from all over the world, use a Web app made by one guy in the Czech Republic. Another interesting fact is that those farms get most of their business from Google ads, and the maker of Photopea in turn makes most of his money from ads.
- krmmalik 6y agoAll I want is a worthy alternative to Adobe After Effects. We have decent alternatives for the rest of the Adobe suite already. Davinci Resolve Fusion isn't quite up to the task just yet.
- Jowsey 6y agoAbsolutely second this. Would love some better competition in this space. Especially something that plays nicely with Linux.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoDoes it work with iPad/Pencil?
- vvoyer 6y agoHey Ivan, congrats! Had a great time with you 2 years ago when you came to Nantes, France to explain "Developing the best free photo editor". Check-out his explanations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A Legend.