11 ms·

Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

218 points by forte124 4y ago

rco8786 4y ago
Photopea is an amazing piece of software.
tantalor 4y ago
> Including his own PDF parser, content-aware fill feature, and even supporting GIFs. Wow, even GIF! Quick history lesson: 1987: GIF invented (Wilhite) 2010: Content aware fill invented (Barnes)
- johndough 4y ago
  I always wonder how so many programs get away with content aware fill with all the patents.
- romwell 4y ago
  >2010: Content aware fill invented (Barnes) I remember learning about content-aware fill algorithms in my computer vision class back when it was the hot new thing, and it felt like it was yesterday! ...it was, in fact, 2010. God damn it.
jollyllama 4y ago
Interesting, never heard of it. I've been using Affinity since ~2017.
- farisjarrah 4y ago
  photopea is one of the best examples of a web application imo. Its a full featured image editing software just running in your browser. No sign up or login required and you can just upload and quickly work off a local file for your computer. You just fire it up and start working.
  - retrofeel 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Normille 4y ago
    Agreed. As a longtime Photoshop user, I was gobsmacked the first time I used Photopea at just how good it was. Gobsmacked even more when I found out it was all written in JS and completely running in the browser with no server backend. EDIT: apparently my enthusiasm is outdated. I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version] and got the following error: "Your browser is too old (no WebAssembly). Please, update it." What a shame!
    - _1tan 4y ago
      Perhaps you should update.
      - Normille 4y ago
        >Perhaps you should update. Ahem.... >I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version] Fixed now, anyway. See above ^^
    - yodon 4y ago
      You likely have a browser setting that needs to be changed. It runs fine for me in Firefox.
      - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
        yeah I'm also on firefox and its working for me. this shouldn't be a problem mozilla supports webassembly
        Normille 4y ago
        Yuu're both right. For some reason I had: about:config > javascript.options.wasm > FALSE Could be that's the default. I certainly don't remember disabling WebAssembly at any time. Photopea working fine in FF now.
- 60secs 4y ago
  The pixelation on affinity magic wand / bucket combo is ridiculous. The poor quality of Affinity results makes it unusable for me. Photopea just works.
foobarian 4y ago
> But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost. Given it's a Javascript program I'm not sure how Photopea solves those problems with Adobe Photoshop other than cost.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
  Photopea is very usable on lower-spec machines that grind to a halt when Photoshop is open. It also "boots" almost instantly, and doesn't require installing anything other than a browser.
  - esalman 4y ago
    True, I have used it briefly on sub $100 Chromebooks.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    Yes, certainly, but the article seems to imply that the author solved those Photoshop problems by creating a Web-based tool, while the actual solution is to make a lightweight tool.
    - utopcell 4y ago
      Isn't it all the more impressive that it can perform better than a native lightweight app ?
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I wish Adobe sold modernized older versions of Photoshop. For most of my uses PS 7 or CS1 is entirely adequate and those versions ran great on a paltry 400Mhz PowerPC G3 with 128MB of RAM, meaning that it'd be blazing fast on the cheapest modern laptops you can find.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      Nobody prevents you to reuse an old copy on a VM or a container. With a shared folder you don't have to give it network access.
sdfhbdf 4y ago
There is little to no time spent in this article on how photopea is monetized. I even went to the product itself to find out but couldn’t, at least on mobile. Is there some subscription? What do you pay for? Genuinely asking since I used it a few times and never noticed any payment nagging.
- forte124 4y ago
  Sorry, I interviewed Ivan and he said roughly 90% of the revenue comes from ads. I also asked him if he considered creating his own header bidding system, but he said this wasn’t worth it
  - sdfhbdf 4y ago
    Ok nice thanks for the clarification
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    Look at photopea.com/ads.txt. He's allowed most of adtech to sell his traffic.
- IvanK_net 4y ago
  25% of our users use Photopea on mobile, but we do not monetize it in these cases, as we think your screen is already too small.
- berelig 4y ago
  It has a $3/month Premium account tier for no ads, increased storage, and double the steps history.
- tintor 4y ago
  It offers paid account for $3.3/mo with 5GB of cloud storage. See red Account button on the menu bar.
- lagrange77 4y ago
  https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.photopea.com%2f https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.photopea.com%2f Have a look at the 'Advertising' section.
mxuribe 4y ago
First off kudos to Ivan - both because i love being a fan of the underdog, but also because what he built really is great! (Maybe a little also because i am definitely NOT a fan of adobe. sorry.) There are a cople of quotes here that are intriguing to me... > "...From 2012 - 2016, Photopea had no monetization plans built in. And after graduation, Ivan only produced $29k in the first year and a half of monetizing..." "Only" $29k!?! "Only" $29k!? I don't know about anyone else, but i actually find that number to be wonderful. Not everyone needs to be facebook-level monetized for their first year. I wish my startup/saas service monetized that much on its first year! > "...Photopea is web-based, but it also is completely built using Javascript with no backend. This means it works offline with no internet connection and doesn't require huge computing power..." I'll admit that when i first learned of photopea - from my offspring no less during one of their homework assignments! - i was impressed right away. Even if it was online only...But i guess i never knew that it can be used offline too! I guess i'll have to play around with it offline. Further, if it is in fact offline usable, well that impresses me a bit from a javascript perspective. I'll admit that i'm not the biggest fan of javascript...but if this kind of comprehensive application can be built with javascript and be usable offline, that's pretty dan impressive, and i guess i gotta give javascript much more respect (and of course play wuith things myself). (Yes, yes, i know that there are Electron apps that leverage lots of javascript for offline purposes, etc...but this thing was built on mostly maintained by one person!) Finally, I really appreciate that they noted that this was not one of those instant success stories. > "...these features weren't built in a day, Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone!...With no paid marketing, Photopea found success through AMAs and old-fashioned, word-of-mouth sharing..." Once again, kudos to Ivan for such a wonderful thing that he built, and for providing with himself a livelihood!!
- bsder 4y ago
  > Once again, kudos to Ivan for such a wonderful thing that he built, and for providing with himself a livelihood!! Agreed. But he had to slog on this for years making zero. It would be nice to have a way to get people like him some money before something goes viral. It also goes to show that "Most overnight successes are 10 years in the making."
FortiDude 4y ago
Photopea should be GIMP's permanent embarrassment. I can't believe running a webapp offline written by a single person is more viable than a native program developed by a vast amount of contributors over decades.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Whenever I see posts like this my immediate reflex is to remind the complainant to have a little respect for the creators. But it’s really hard to disagree with this…
  - prox 4y ago
    Sorry but the creators have such a disdain for any form user experience enhancements that I cannot give them a pass.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      As a GIMP user for 20+ years there’s no way I can defend them.
    - arriu 4y ago
      I think many of us really wanted it to succeed and tried to love it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t what most people want.
    - zeruch 4y ago
      That's been the feeling of many of us for years (literally, when I knew a few of the GIMP folks back in my VA Linux days I rattled off stuff I thought was valuable and some of its still not there...mostly around the baroque UX, 20+ years on). It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.
      - prox 4y ago
        I tried to talk and engage in the community for a while, came up with really well researched tried-and-tested UX improvements, only to be dismissed as not “relevant”. Further engagements only seem to be showing how opaque the decision making process is (you can see this in a different form in the wordpress community btw)
ignoramous 4y ago
> ...Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone! Amazing feat to not only have the skill but the patience to make something people want. Projects rarely die in mid-keystroke. Keep typing, Ivan.
troymc 4y ago
I recently switched back to using Ubuntu as my desktop OS, and was intrigued to see that Photopea was the default app to open many file types, including PDF. I thought that was odd because while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source [1]. [1] https://github.com/photopea/photopea https://github.com/photopea/photopea
- IvanK_net 4y ago
  If you go to www.Photopea.com and press More - "Install Photopea", it will install the so-called "PWA". This allows starting Photopea with a homescreen icon, in a window without a browser UI. It also allows associating a website with certain extensions, so your system will "open files in a website". It should work on every device/OS/browser (in the long run). You can uninstall it in your browser under about://apps
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yunohn 4y ago
  That’s interesting, I haven’t experienced this. Evince should be the default PDF reader, I can’t imagine why it would be Photopea.
- jewel 4y ago
  It's not the default on my Ubuntu, and I don't even see it in apt or snap. I wonder if perhaps you've confused it with another program, or are running an Ubuntu derivative.
  - troymc 4y ago
    Ubuntu 22.04 with everything default. When I go to the "Files" app and open a PDF, it opens the PDF in my default web browser at photopea.com, i.e. it's not an "app on my machine" so it doesn't show up in the apt list. Photopea does show up us as one of the options when I click on "Show Applications."
- orra 4y ago
  > while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source Quite the understatement. Photopea isn't open source at all.
mgomez 4y ago
Ivan did an AMA earlier this year which is also worth a read: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/s2elpv/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/?sort=confidence https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/s2elpv/i_made_a_free_...
mattbee 4y ago
Odds on Adobe making Ivan "an offer he can't refuse" then? They don't stand faster-moving competition for long, I hear.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  It can work offline (on the frontend) so you can just wget & archive the latest working version and host it on your own domain. It wont gain more features but it is an alternative.
busymom0 4y ago
I have used Photopea for 3-4 years now for creating all the screenshots and icons required for my iOS and android apps. It’s one of the best software I have used. Super quick to load in browser and not having to install anything on a new Mac are incredible. I should probably buy the premium membership to support the developer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alberth 4y ago
I've always been surprised that Figma hasn't acquired Photopea. I guess Adobe could do that now.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Not sure if Adobe has any other reason to acquire Photopea other than to kill it so that there's no more "free" Photoshop alternatives.
  - conductr 4y ago
    When regulators come knocking for some reason, "look we offer free software, nobody is required to pay"
    - kyriakos 4y ago
      Isn't photoshop for the web going to be free too? It's possible that projects like photopea are forcing their hand.
Daunk 4y ago
I've tried Photopea a million times, but the interface always messes up somehow. I just tried it, and sure enough, a huge grey box is stuck on the right side of the screen and can't be removed.
- recursive 4y ago
  Github is wrong then. Check the blog for a more authoritative source. https://blog.photopea.com/ https://blog.photopea.com/
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  That sounds like it might be an ad partially blocked by your ad blocker?
  - qbit42 4y ago
    Yeah, that's a panel for an ad.
jwilk 4y ago
External links without tracking junk: • Ivan Kutskir: https://twitter.com/ivankutskir https://twitter.com/ivankutskir • Photopea: https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ • first Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_... • another Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c8ru2y/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c8ru2y/i_made_a_free_... • Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 • Pieter Levels tweet: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381584225380528129?s=20&t=8HUfhMA9ZjeFojzwOJGHtw https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381584225380528129?s=20... • Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/photopea https://www.producthunt.com/products/photopea • 4,000 feature requests: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues
kabes 4y ago
I'm surprised Adobe hasn't tried to sue him.
- conductr 4y ago
  This comment also goes for all those commenters trashing GIMP. Had this UI came out in the 90s Adobe would have killed GIMP with their legal team.
vvoyer 4y ago
Hey Ivan, congrats from Nantes, come back when you want :)
- IvanK_net 4y ago
  Thanks, I loved it there! :) I gave a talk in Nantes about making Photopea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
dang 4y ago
Related: Building a Free Photo Editor and Making $100k/Mo as a Solo Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32693191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32693191 - Sept 2022 (3 comments) Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692372 - Sept 2022 (50 comments) Reddit Photopea founder – I have millions of users, but no businesses use it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357839 - Feb 2022 (19 comments) Photopea: A free alternative to Photoshop used by millions of people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 - April 2021 (5 comments) AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 - April 2021 (267 comments) AMA with the Creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143189 - Aug 2020 (6 comments) Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380 - Nov 2018 (179 comments) My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 - Dec 2017 (80 comments) Photo Pea 0.3 – New features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624264 - Oct 2013 (7 comments) HTML5 image editor wants to replace Photoshop and Gimp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396474 - Sept 2013 (4 comments)
lxe 4y ago
Photopea is what I go for when I need an example of a product that's 100% perfect. Pretty much everything about it is polished, quick, intuitive, bug-free, and just works. I've been using it and advocating for it for years. The cost to remove the ads is absolutely worth it too.
cutler 4y ago
So that settles it - Javascript is all you need.
- _nalply 4y ago
  Photopea is using WebAssembly, too.
  - cutler 4y ago
    So Javascript and Rust? I'm cool with that. Both ends of the programming spectrum. Thinking further on this, could WA offer a way out of the walled garden of mobile development?
johnthuss 4y ago
If this product is just a few static javascript files, what keeps someone else from just taking these and hosting them on their own site, building up their own user base and pocketing the money?
- anonu 4y ago
  Copyright laws?
  - johnthuss 4y ago
    Sure, but isn’t that hard to enforce internationally? I love this concept, I just worry about people stealing it.
the-printer 4y ago
I don’t think that I can program worth a nickel, but this story sure is inspiring.
czhu12 4y ago
I use this almost daily for putting together random image assets for other things Im building. Every penny the founder makes us well deserved, I can’t imagine the amount of value for users Photopea has created since inception.

218 points by forte124 4y ago

Photopea is an amazing piece of software.

> Including his own PDF parser, content-aware fill feature, and even supporting GIFs. Wow, even GIF! Quick history lesson: 1987: GIF invented (Wilhite) 2010: Content aware fill invented (Barnes)

johndough 4y ago
I always wonder how so many programs get away with content aware fill with all the patents.
romwell 4y ago
>2010: Content aware fill invented (Barnes) I remember learning about content-aware fill algorithms in my computer vision class back when it was the hot new thing, and it felt like it was yesterday! ...it was, in fact, 2010. God damn it.

jollyllama 4y ago

Interesting, never heard of it. I've been using Affinity since ~2017.

farisjarrah 4y ago
photopea is one of the best examples of a web application imo. Its a full featured image editing software just running in your browser. No sign up or login required and you can just upload and quickly work off a local file for your computer. You just fire it up and start working.
- retrofeel 4y ago
  [dead]
- Normille 4y ago
  Agreed. As a longtime Photoshop user, I was gobsmacked the first time I used Photopea at just how good it was. Gobsmacked even more when I found out it was all written in JS and completely running in the browser with no server backend. EDIT: apparently my enthusiasm is outdated. I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version] and got the following error: "Your browser is too old (no WebAssembly). Please, update it." What a shame!
  - _1tan 4y ago
    Perhaps you should update.
    - Normille 4y ago
      >Perhaps you should update. Ahem.... >I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version] Fixed now, anyway. See above ^^
  - yodon 4y ago
    You likely have a browser setting that needs to be changed. It runs fine for me in Firefox.
    - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
      yeah I'm also on firefox and its working for me. this shouldn't be a problem mozilla supports webassembly
      - Normille 4y ago
        Yuu're both right. For some reason I had: about:config > javascript.options.wasm > FALSE Could be that's the default. I certainly don't remember disabling WebAssembly at any time. Photopea working fine in FF now.
60secs 4y ago
The pixelation on affinity magic wand / bucket combo is ridiculous. The poor quality of Affinity results makes it unusable for me. Photopea just works.

foobarian 4y ago

> But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost. Given it's a Javascript program I'm not sure how Photopea solves those problems with Adobe Photoshop other than cost.

SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
Photopea is very usable on lower-spec machines that grind to a halt when Photoshop is open. It also "boots" almost instantly, and doesn't require installing anything other than a browser.
- esalman 4y ago
  True, I have used it briefly on sub $100 Chromebooks.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Yes, certainly, but the article seems to imply that the author solved those Photoshop problems by creating a Web-based tool, while the actual solution is to make a lightweight tool.
  - utopcell 4y ago
    Isn't it all the more impressive that it can perform better than a native lightweight app ?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I wish Adobe sold modernized older versions of Photoshop. For most of my uses PS 7 or CS1 is entirely adequate and those versions ran great on a paltry 400Mhz PowerPC G3 with 128MB of RAM, meaning that it'd be blazing fast on the cheapest modern laptops you can find.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Nobody prevents you to reuse an old copy on a VM or a container. With a shared folder you don't have to give it network access.

sdfhbdf 4y ago

There is little to no time spent in this article on how photopea is monetized. I even went to the product itself to find out but couldn’t, at least on mobile. Is there some subscription? What do you pay for? Genuinely asking since I used it a few times and never noticed any payment nagging.

forte124 4y ago
Sorry, I interviewed Ivan and he said roughly 90% of the revenue comes from ads. I also asked him if he considered creating his own header bidding system, but he said this wasn’t worth it
- sdfhbdf 4y ago
  Ok nice thanks for the clarification
- secondcoming 4y ago
  Look at photopea.com/ads.txt. He's allowed most of adtech to sell his traffic.
IvanK_net 4y ago
25% of our users use Photopea on mobile, but we do not monetize it in these cases, as we think your screen is already too small.
berelig 4y ago
It has a $3/month Premium account tier for no ads, increased storage, and double the steps history.
tintor 4y ago
It offers paid account for $3.3/mo with 5GB of cloud storage. See red Account button on the menu bar.
lagrange77 4y ago
https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.photopea.com%2f https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.photopea.com%2f Have a look at the 'Advertising' section.

mxuribe 4y ago

First off kudos to Ivan - both because i love being a fan of the underdog, but also because what he built really is great! (Maybe a little also because i am definitely NOT a fan of adobe. sorry.) There are a cople of quotes here that are intriguing to me... > "...From 2012 - 2016, Photopea had no monetization plans built in. And after graduation, Ivan only produced $29k in the first year and a half of monetizing..." "Only" $29k!?! "Only" $29k!? I don't know about anyone else, but i actually find that number to be wonderful. Not everyone needs to be facebook-level monetized for their first year. I wish my startup/saas service monetized that much on its first year! > "...Photopea is web-based, but it also is completely built using Javascript with no backend. This means it works offline with no internet connection and doesn't require huge computing power..." I'll admit that when i first learned of photopea - from my offspring no less during one of their homework assignments! - i was impressed right away. Even if it was online only...But i guess i never knew that it can be used offline too! I guess i'll have to play around with it offline. Further, if it is in fact offline usable, well that impresses me a bit from a javascript perspective. I'll admit that i'm not the biggest fan of javascript...but if this kind of comprehensive application can be built with javascript and be usable offline, that's pretty dan impressive, and i guess i gotta give javascript much more respect (and of course play wuith things myself). (Yes, yes, i know that there are Electron apps that leverage lots of javascript for offline purposes, etc...but this thing was built on mostly maintained by one person!) Finally, I really appreciate that they noted that this was not one of those instant success stories. > "...these features weren't built in a day, Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone!...With no paid marketing, Photopea found success through AMAs and old-fashioned, word-of-mouth sharing..." Once again, kudos to Ivan for such a wonderful thing that he built, and for providing with himself a livelihood!!

bsder 4y ago
> Once again, kudos to Ivan for such a wonderful thing that he built, and for providing with himself a livelihood!! Agreed. But he had to slog on this for years making zero. It would be nice to have a way to get people like him some money before something goes viral. It also goes to show that "Most overnight successes are 10 years in the making."

FortiDude 4y ago

Photopea should be GIMP's permanent embarrassment. I can't believe running a webapp offline written by a single person is more viable than a native program developed by a vast amount of contributors over decades.

tomcam 4y ago
Whenever I see posts like this my immediate reflex is to remind the complainant to have a little respect for the creators. But it’s really hard to disagree with this…
- prox 4y ago
  Sorry but the creators have such a disdain for any form user experience enhancements that I cannot give them a pass.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    As a GIMP user for 20+ years there’s no way I can defend them.
  - arriu 4y ago
    I think many of us really wanted it to succeed and tried to love it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t what most people want.
  - zeruch 4y ago
    That's been the feeling of many of us for years (literally, when I knew a few of the GIMP folks back in my VA Linux days I rattled off stuff I thought was valuable and some of its still not there...mostly around the baroque UX, 20+ years on). It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.
    - prox 4y ago
      I tried to talk and engage in the community for a while, came up with really well researched tried-and-tested UX improvements, only to be dismissed as not “relevant”. Further engagements only seem to be showing how opaque the decision making process is (you can see this in a different form in the wordpress community btw)

ignoramous 4y ago

> ...Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone! Amazing feat to not only have the skill but the patience to make something people want. Projects rarely die in mid-keystroke. Keep typing, Ivan.

troymc 4y ago

I recently switched back to using Ubuntu as my desktop OS, and was intrigued to see that Photopea was the default app to open many file types, including PDF. I thought that was odd because while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source [1]. [1] https://github.com/photopea/photopea https://github.com/photopea/photopea

IvanK_net 4y ago
If you go to www.Photopea.com and press More - "Install Photopea", it will install the so-called "PWA". This allows starting Photopea with a homescreen icon, in a window without a browser UI. It also allows associating a website with certain extensions, so your system will "open files in a website". It should work on every device/OS/browser (in the long run). You can uninstall it in your browser under about://apps
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yunohn 4y ago
That’s interesting, I haven’t experienced this. Evince should be the default PDF reader, I can’t imagine why it would be Photopea.
jewel 4y ago
It's not the default on my Ubuntu, and I don't even see it in apt or snap. I wonder if perhaps you've confused it with another program, or are running an Ubuntu derivative.
- troymc 4y ago
  Ubuntu 22.04 with everything default. When I go to the "Files" app and open a PDF, it opens the PDF in my default web browser at photopea.com, i.e. it's not an "app on my machine" so it doesn't show up in the apt list. Photopea does show up us as one of the options when I click on "Show Applications."
orra 4y ago
> while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source Quite the understatement. Photopea isn't open source at all.

mgomez 4y ago

Ivan did an AMA earlier this year which is also worth a read: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/s2elpv/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/?sort=confidence https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/s2elpv/i_made_a_free_...

mattbee 4y ago

Odds on Adobe making Ivan "an offer he can't refuse" then? They don't stand faster-moving competition for long, I hear.

IceWreck 4y ago
It can work offline (on the frontend) so you can just wget & archive the latest working version and host it on your own domain. It wont gain more features but it is an alternative.

busymom0 4y ago

I have used Photopea for 3-4 years now for creating all the screenshots and icons required for my iOS and android apps. It’s one of the best software I have used. Super quick to load in browser and not having to install anything on a new Mac are incredible. I should probably buy the premium membership to support the developer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alberth 4y ago

I've always been surprised that Figma hasn't acquired Photopea. I guess Adobe could do that now.

Hamuko 4y ago
Not sure if Adobe has any other reason to acquire Photopea other than to kill it so that there's no more "free" Photoshop alternatives.
- conductr 4y ago
  When regulators come knocking for some reason, "look we offer free software, nobody is required to pay"
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    Isn't photoshop for the web going to be free too? It's possible that projects like photopea are forcing their hand.

Daunk 4y ago

I've tried Photopea a million times, but the interface always messes up somehow. I just tried it, and sure enough, a huge grey box is stuck on the right side of the screen and can't be removed.

recursive 4y ago
Github is wrong then. Check the blog for a more authoritative source. https://blog.photopea.com/ https://blog.photopea.com/
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
That sounds like it might be an ad partially blocked by your ad blocker?
- qbit42 4y ago
  Yeah, that's a panel for an ad.

jwilk 4y ago

External links without tracking junk: • Ivan Kutskir: https://twitter.com/ivankutskir https://twitter.com/ivankutskir • Photopea: https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ • first Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_... • another Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c8ru2y/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c8ru2y/i_made_a_free_... • Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 • Pieter Levels tweet: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381584225380528129?s=20&t=8HUfhMA9ZjeFojzwOJGHtw https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381584225380528129?s=20... • Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/photopea https://www.producthunt.com/products/photopea • 4,000 feature requests: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues

kabes 4y ago

I'm surprised Adobe hasn't tried to sue him.

conductr 4y ago
This comment also goes for all those commenters trashing GIMP. Had this UI came out in the 90s Adobe would have killed GIMP with their legal team.

vvoyer 4y ago

Hey Ivan, congrats from Nantes, come back when you want :)

IvanK_net 4y ago
Thanks, I loved it there! :) I gave a talk in Nantes about making Photopea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A

dang 4y ago

Related: Building a Free Photo Editor and Making $100k/Mo as a Solo Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32693191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32693191 - Sept 2022 (3 comments) Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692372 - Sept 2022 (50 comments) Reddit Photopea founder – I have millions of users, but no businesses use it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357839 - Feb 2022 (19 comments) Photopea: A free alternative to Photoshop used by millions of people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 - April 2021 (5 comments) AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 - April 2021 (267 comments) AMA with the Creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143189 - Aug 2020 (6 comments) Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380 - Nov 2018 (179 comments) My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 - Dec 2017 (80 comments) Photo Pea 0.3 – New features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624264 - Oct 2013 (7 comments) HTML5 image editor wants to replace Photoshop and Gimp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396474 - Sept 2013 (4 comments)

lxe 4y ago

Photopea is what I go for when I need an example of a product that's 100% perfect. Pretty much everything about it is polished, quick, intuitive, bug-free, and just works. I've been using it and advocating for it for years. The cost to remove the ads is absolutely worth it too.

cutler 4y ago

So that settles it - Javascript is all you need.

_nalply 4y ago
Photopea is using WebAssembly, too.
- cutler 4y ago
  So Javascript and Rust? I'm cool with that. Both ends of the programming spectrum. Thinking further on this, could WA offer a way out of the walled garden of mobile development?

johnthuss 4y ago

If this product is just a few static javascript files, what keeps someone else from just taking these and hosting them on their own site, building up their own user base and pocketing the money?

anonu 4y ago
Copyright laws?
- johnthuss 4y ago
  Sure, but isn’t that hard to enforce internationally? I love this concept, I just worry about people stealing it.

the-printer 4y ago

I don’t think that I can program worth a nickel, but this story sure is inspiring.

czhu12 4y ago

I use this almost daily for putting together random image assets for other things Im building. Every penny the founder makes us well deserved, I can’t imagine the amount of value for users Photopea has created since inception.