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Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app
- whoibrar 4y agoI've been using this on/off for sometime. I've realised must of my editing is very basic and this has been overkill for little tasks as adding text overlay and cropping.
- metadat 4y agoPhotopea is a remarkable thing, so much functionality in only a few megabytes! Why is Adobe Photoshop so bloated? Unfortunate the licensing model means Photopea is not FOSS and not available in a proper self-hosted form (e.g. a docker container): https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/4870 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/4870 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/1565 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/1565 (They do have a channel for you to email them and request [beg?] an API key license thing, see: https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts#self-hosted https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts#self-hosted) I wonder if anyone has compiled GIMP to Wasm yet..
- wodenokoto 4y ago> They do have a channel for you to email them and request [beg?] an API key license thing Doesn't sound like you need to beg, just pay.
- desindol 4y agoIt's a solo dev...
- TheRealPomax 4y agoWhat's unfortunate about that? The (single!) author of this software deserves every dollar they make for the thing they made, software doesn't need to be open source to be good software. If you want to stand up your own private copy, contact them and arrange a fair contract where you pay them a large and entirely reasonable amount of money in exchange for a non-transferable, non-competing license to run a private, offline instance.
- metadat 4y agoGood point. Thank you @TheRealPomax. The phenomenon of projects existing and being openly available on GitHub has somehow led to me having an inappropriate expectation about them being FOSS. I accept it's a "me" problem.
- spoils19 4y agoI wouldn't back down in your scenario, as RMS says, all software should be free, implying that it should be open for us to change as needed.
- diroussel 4y agoJust because RMS says it doesn’t mean it’s true.
- metadat 4y agoThe author doesn't owe the general public a FOSS product. The source is already freely available, which is better than nothing. For a relevant example, consider Adobe- they are actively hostile to sharing source code. Complete capitalist jackasses, yet Adobe doesn't generally get a hard time about it on HN or elsewhere.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoJust because someone says it, doesn't make it either true, or even sensible as "this is how it should be". Unless you can back up that statement with strong arguments (which RMS can't, ideology doesn't pay real world bills, and unlike RMS, the rest of us don't get paid lavish speaker fees) appealing to authority does nothing to strengthen a position.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoIt's unfortunate that: - you can't learn its techniques - you can't improve it - you can't fix it - the author could change their mind about distributing any part (or whole) of it at any time - the author may include undesirable features - the author could sell the software to someone who does the above - the software is limited in its reach to those who can afford and have a possibility to pay for it Of course, the author deserves every dollar for the time they spend making the software. It's unfortunate if they have to restrict the software to do that. There is a whole philosophy about Free Software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
- urbandw311er 4y agoI can highly recommend using an app like “Web Catalog” (MacOS) to containerise it into its own separate application. I have photopea set up like this and it’s very handy.
- tmdh 4y agoCould there be any legal trouble for making a clone of Photoshop?
- xeromal 4y agoPhotopea has been ongoing for quite some time. I've thought the same but maybe adobe doesn't care
- rolisz 4y agoAnd not only that, but as far as I know the solo dev behind Photopea has been contacted by the Photoshop team to work together on some format. Unfortunately, i can't find the quote right now.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoIs it an exact copy? Or just another image editor?
- xsmasher 4y agoGimp is an image editor, but not a "photoshop clone" - a lot of interfaces and features are different. Photopha is a very near clone; all of my "muscle memory" from photoshop works fine in Photopea, including must keyboard shortcuts. Everything is where I expect it to be. I don't think those arrangements of features are copyrightable, though.
- rikroots 4y agoPhotopea has been mentioned several times on HN. When this question was raised before, I think the answer was that the layout of Photoshop is not protected by copyright, thus the Photopea author is within his rights to use it as inspiration for his product.
- alberth 4y agoIt’s also created by a single person who generates over $1M in annual revenue.[0] He’s also commented on HN about it.[1] [0] https://www.failory.com/interview/photopea https://www.failory.com/interview/photopea [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769141
- agluszak 4y agoI know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing revenue. Revenue != usefulness in general (I'm not saying that's the case here)
- urbandw311er 4y agoThe fact that a single person is generating that amount of revenue from this clone is a fact I find both relevant and interesting. I’m not sure there’s any particular evidence this is being “glamourised”.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoMost of us have a ~/Code folder full of useful things that bring in $0, so I don't think there's much revenue==utility conflation happening here. It's just that building something that brings in good money by yourself is something just about everyone wants to be able to do. It's an interesting story when people pull it off, especially another HNer.
- amjd 4y agoThen what would you glamorize? I'd think that in a free-market economy revenue is a pretty good proxy for usefulness too in most cases.
- DrBoring 4y agoI like to think of it this way: Revenue != Usefulness (to the users of the app) Revenue == Usefulness (to the recipient of the revenue) Analogy to non-software biz: 1. CandyCo buys ChocolateCo 2. CandyCo changes ChocolateCo recipe to use less expensive ingredients, generating new revenue for CandyCo, but less tasty chocolates for ChocolateCo's long time customers. 3. The new revenue has disparate usefulness for the two interested parties.
- nestorD 4y agoThis has dropped all my needs for Photoshop down to zero (I use it about once a month for things that range from tweaking a picture for someone to cleaning up an illustration for a book). It is great, I recommend it a few times a year, and my only hope is that the author has plans to open source it if he ever gets hit by a bus.
- postscapes1 4y ago+1 This tool is amazing. I also heard Neil Patel on a podcast saying he tried to acquire it for $10M+ and the developer declining the offer
- jjbinx007 4y agoThere's another online photo editor which has got a very similar GUI once you get past the rather garish and awful looking title screen: https://pixlr.com/e/ https://pixlr.com/e/
- QuantumGood 4y agoI subscribed to Pixlr, used it extensively, and don't recommend it compared to Photopea. I have also been a photoshop user for 10+ years.
- dathanb82 4y agoThe most impressive part to me is how much snappier it is than Photoshop running locally on my machine.
- lukax 4y agoEvery once in a while I need to edit an image on macOS. I used to open GIMP, wait on the loading screen for 3 minutes so that it rebuilt the font cache ("Looking for data files: Fonts (this may take a while)"), open the image, use Cage Transform (wait 30 seconds for it to process the image), save to my home dir, because on recent versions of macOS it does not properly handle permissions to write in Documents folder ("Could not read the contents of Documents"). Now I open GIMP, remember that Photopea exists, quit GIMP, open Photopea, drop the image, transform it (every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app) and just export the image to my Downloads folder. I'm so happy I don't have to use GIMP anymore.
- wildrhythms 4y agoPhotopea is amazing, but for more complex edits on Mac OS I started using Pixelmator Pro and it's miles better than Photoshop's increasingly bloated and slow experience. I genuinely don't understand how Photoshop has gotten worse since the CS3 era, it's baffling.
- cxr 4y ago> every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app That shouldn't be surprising. Ivan Kutskir (the Photopea guy) is not an NPM programmer. The slowness that you're accustomed to today from the modern Web and the average Electron app is not a JS problem. It's a modern-Web-and-the-average-Electron-app problem, i.e., a doing-it-the-NPM-way problem. JS runtimes are fast, and well-written programs written in JS are fast, too. (In fact, mediocre programs were generally fast enough even when the runtimes weren't especially performance-focused.) The problem is that mainstream JS development took a left turn around 10 years ago. We have enough evidence by now to say that this really is the ailment. What happened is that what the community considers best practices today are actually bad practices. If you look at the serious applications of JS that otherwise break from the NodeJS/NPM crowd's conventional wisdom (incl. Firefox, Gnome, and projects like this one, for example, that don't buy in as heavily on GitHub trends and other résumé-driven development), they're snappy. Indeed, they're snappy enough that many people are generally not even aware that it's JS (or, in the case of Photopea, wouldn't know it if it weren't for the obvious/unavoidable indicators of what's behind the curtain).
- benj111 4y agoIs this pronounced 'photo pea' or 'photope a'?
- ksaj 4y agoThis is a good site for people who insist that js is limited and too slow. I'm really surprised at how quick this is, given such a full feature set.