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!!
> 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."
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Practically speaking yes, and it’s probably ok to do that for personal use. Where things get shaky is if you want to use it professionally — even if you buy an old license key off of eBay Adobe could decide the license is no longer valid and sue you.
If you had already that license I don't think Adobe can revoke it. I don't think it is legal to revoke a license that is sold in the second hand market either.
The biggest risk I can think of is that the old product may be in some case vulnerable to compromised documents and by sharing the sandbox folder with your main computer you could in theory get the main machine compromised.
WebAssembly only helps to a small degree here. SIMD support is still too limited and real multithreading will probably never be possible due to spectre vulnerability, so you are leaving about two orders of magnitude of performance on the table.
WebGL 2.0 could be a band aid fix, but it is quite limited compared to CUDA. I'd also expect a bunch of compatibility issues.
As a side note, Photopea already uses WebAssembly.
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.
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."
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?
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].
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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)
You have to keep in mind that for as many non gimp user asking for a change in gimp UI there are as many current gimp users who would not necessarily see it as a good change if it hurts their muscle memory and workflow.
For example when they introduced the single window mode as default, I view it as a regression only because people can't use a window manager properly or pretend to do professional stuff on what is just a glorified video game console OS with a shitty windows management. Thanksfully they kept an option to keep using multiple windows mode for us.
Well, I can understand the position of long time gimp users, but ultimately you have to move on to better paradigms and years of UX research. If you match it with a legacy mode, things can be a smooth transition.
In that time I used GIMP a lot and was a good moderate level user probably, but the interface kept getting in my way (unlike Photoshop were I was able to reach almost a flow state of doing things at that time)
Eventually I just moved on, but I can’t fully shake the feeling that GIMP could have been so much more. Godot and Blender which others mentioned just have done so much better in that regard. Blender had the suckiest of UX/UI but even in the face of much/some “old timer” resistance they made something that most hail as a success now.
Blender has indeed been a much more "slow overnight success" than I suspect GIMP will ever be, and that's unfortunate, because its not like GIMP is lacking in the potential.
Photopea's killer feature is the fact that it, for the most part, directly copies Photoshop's implementations of features. There's no learning curve because it's basically the same. On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.
You can do all the same stuff in the gimp, but it's just a little more laborious (or a lot more laborious if you're used to photoshop already I guess). The gimp lets you easily do all the same transformations, copy and reapply transformations, etc. It seems like the adjustment layer keeps the original image and the transformations to make it easier to repeatedly tinker with those adjustments and reapply them more quickly, though.
Adjustment layers are a key part of a non-destructive editing workflow. Without them, doing professional work like retouching is much more difficult. GIMP's issue is that they don't seem to care about power user workflows.
Once upon a time there was a fork called 'gimpshop' that added a PS-like UI to gimp. Clever idea. Warning - the current gimpshop domain hosts some scammer's adware-laden rip-off.
I use Photopea at work precisely because of this. I know how to use Photoshop, but I don't have a license for Photoshop as an engineer, but I do sometimes need it. Photopea fills that role perfectly and it's almost a perfect drop-in replacement.
> On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.
Or even a layer palette with a list view that acts like a normal list view with e.g. shift-click to multi-select, like every list view on every platform has had for upwards of two decades by now.
Depends what your goal is. For a long time the GIMP people were pretty clear they just wanted to work on it in their spare time for fun. Ton on the other hand always had some very clear and much bigger ideas what he wanted to do with Blender. Is one way "better" or "worse"? I don't think so, it just depends on what your goals are.
When working with big complex applications, learning how to use them is no small investment. It's not a matter of which development methodology better or worse, what matters to me is whether or not I will see a return on my investment.
With Krita, Blender, Inkscape, Love2D, even Kate, I'm confident those time investments will be worth it.
With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.
> With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.
Why?
I unlearnt photoshop 2 decades ago (basically when I stopped being a teenager/young adult downloading pirate copy of softwares I can't afford) and got used to gimp and I never really missed the photoshop.
This is very believable, it is called disruption and is standard in software. Old companies (or projects) will have the legacy of older technology. That 100k LOC ... is a liability too. You have to get your head around it. Many heads. And to change it, you have to work on ... "it". Not what you dream it to be.
He's done a fantastic job. Meanwhile the GIMP still doesn't have a "Save As..." menu item, you have to go through extra steps using "Export". Just a symptom of the attitude the UI projects.
Maybe all the time looking for how to **ing save the first time, plus all the extra time clicking thereafter, plus the times you forget momentarily and take the wrong route again...
Gimp is a great idea but is a non-starter because of the incredibly disturbing name. I've never heard of photopea before today, but I'm sure glad there's a good alternative.
It would be offensive if that word was refering to someone. It doesn't. It refered initially to "General Image Manipulation Program" and now to "Gnu Image Manipulation Program". It is litterally in the front page of the Gimp website. It is an acronym.
Yeah but if there was a program called HITLER, NAZI, CRIPPLE or what have you, even if their names were acronyms, would you really not think twice about using it?
Congrats from reaching godwin point so early. The former 2 are not really the same scale as they refer to real events that occured, an ideology and agenda.
I don't think I would be annoyed by a software called cripple, especially if it also stands for something else through the acronym., I would probably take it as a joke on the potentially beta status of the software at some point in its life. Again it is not targetting anyone in particular, unlike the former 2.
Gimp has been solving the need of users looking for an open source image editing software for decades. It has been used and forked as filmgimp, now cinepaint who has been used in the film industry.
GIMP doesn't have that many contributors; it's hard to estimate the total contributors at a quick glance because so many committers only commit translation updates, but it doesn't seem more than about 20 over a 25-year period that have some serious (non-drive-by) contributions, all active at different times. Just 4 people seem to account for well over 75% (3 of which are no longer active). At the moment it's about 4 people, give or take, who work on it somewhat regularly.
Is the state of GIMP annoying and frustrating? Sure. Is it a failure to more effectively allocate resources to work on a fairly critical piece of software? I think so. But if you look at the technical side of things it's not that clear-cut at all. Remember that back in the day GIMP had to invent their own toolkit (GTK).
Being a webapp is probably an advantage here. What's the big thing for GIMP 3? The port to GTK 3. Does that really add anything for users? Not really, as such. But that kind of stuff is quite a big time-sink and doesn't really add any features. Same with the new build system, wayland support, i18n changes, etc. which doesn't really "do" anything other than keep the thing from bitrotting.
Photopea has had someone work on it full-time for over 5 years; if you put that against the evenings and Sundays that people work on GIMP, and consider all the "plumbing" they had to do that Photopea doesn't have to deal with then the differences in time spent are probably much smaller than you'd might suspect at a glance.
GIMP has a neat feature called "Color To Alpha", which no other editor has (including Adobe Photoshop). I have added it to Photopea two years ago: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/2205
External links without tracking junk:
• Ivan Kutskir: https://twitter.com/ivankutskir
• Photopea: https://www.photopea.com/
• first Reddit AMA: 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_...
• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550
• Pieter Levels tweet: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381584225380528129?s=20...
• Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/photopea
• 4,000 feature requests: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues
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!!
> 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."
Agreed on all points! :-)
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.
It has a $3/month Premium account tier for no ads, increased storage, and double the steps history.
It offers paid account for $3.3/mo with 5GB of cloud storage. See red Account button on the menu bar.
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
Look at photopea.com/ads.txt. He's allowed most of adtech to sell his traffic.
Ok nice thanks for the clarification
https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.photopea.com%2f
Have a look at the 'Advertising' section.
There are ads on the very right side of the browser. You can pay to remove the ads.
Open the website without an adblocker and you'll see how. There's huge banner ads on the side.
Oh right I probably have a content blocker enabled.
Still surprising how much as revenue they’re generating
Ads, premium subscriptions to turn off the ads, and licensing to other sites that then host it under different names with more ads.
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.
> ...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.
> 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)
I always wonder how so many programs get away with content aware fill with all the patents.
>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.
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.
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_...
Photopea is an amazing piece of software.
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.
> 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.
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.
True, I have used it briefly on sub $100 Chromebooks.
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.
Isn't it all the more impressive that it can perform better than a native lightweight app ?
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.
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.
Practically speaking yes, and it’s probably ok to do that for personal use. Where things get shaky is if you want to use it professionally — even if you buy an old license key off of eBay Adobe could decide the license is no longer valid and sue you.
If you had already that license I don't think Adobe can revoke it. I don't think it is legal to revoke a license that is sold in the second hand market either.
The biggest risk I can think of is that the old product may be in some case vulnerable to compromised documents and by sharing the sandbox folder with your main computer you could in theory get the main machine compromised.
it could do what figma does, use web assembly and web workers
WebAssembly only helps to a small degree here. SIMD support is still too limited and real multithreading will probably never be possible due to spectre vulnerability, so you are leaving about two orders of magnitude of performance on the table.
WebGL 2.0 could be a band aid fix, but it is quite limited compared to CUDA. I'd also expect a bunch of compatibility issues.
As a side note, Photopea already uses WebAssembly.
PS performance has been getting worse over the years. I've been using it for almost 20 years and it really peaked with CS6.
The core engine might be fast for computational intensive stuff (eg: radial blur, liquify, etc) but the UI itself is tremendously clunky.
I used to love using PS (and the whole Adobe suite) but now I dread it.
Interesting, never heard of it. I've been using Affinity since ~2017.
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.
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!
Perhaps you should update.
Ahem....
Fixed now, anyway. See above ^^
You likely have a browser setting that needs to be changed. It runs fine for me in Firefox.
yeah I'm also on firefox and its working for me. this shouldn't be a problem mozilla supports webassembly
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.
Hmm, are you on an old version of FF? I just tried it in 106.0.1 on Ubuntu and it worked fine (even with uBlock and some other adblockers).
The pixelation on affinity magic wand / bucket combo is ridiculous. The poor quality of Affinity results makes it unusable for me.
Photopea just works.
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?
Copyright laws?
Sure, but isn’t that hard to enforce internationally?
I love this concept, I just worry about people stealing it.
I'm surprised Adobe hasn't tried to sue him.
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.
Related:
Building a Free Photo Editor and Making $100k/Mo as a Solo Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32693191 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)
Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app - 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 - Feb 2022 (19 comments)
Photopea: A free alternative to Photoshop used by millions of people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 - April 2021 (5 comments)
AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 - April 2021 (267 comments)
AMA with the Creator of Photopea - 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 - Nov 2018 (179 comments)
My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 - Dec 2017 (80 comments)
Photo Pea 0.3 – New features - 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 - Sept 2013 (4 comments)
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
That’s interesting, I haven’t experienced this. Evince should be the default PDF reader, I can’t imagine why it would be Photopea.
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.
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."
> while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source
Quite the understatement. Photopea isn't open source at all.
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
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.
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.
Github is wrong then. Check the blog for a more authoritative source.
https://blog.photopea.com/
That sounds like it might be an ad partially blocked by your ad blocker?
Yeah, that's a panel for an ad.
Odds on Adobe making Ivan "an offer he can't refuse" then? They don't stand faster-moving competition for long, I hear.
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.
So that settles it - Javascript is all you need.
Photopea is using WebAssembly, too.
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?
I've always been surprised that Figma hasn't acquired Photopea. I guess Adobe could do that now.
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.
When regulators come knocking for some reason, "look we offer free software, nobody is required to pay"
Isn't photoshop for the web going to be free too? It's possible that projects like photopea are forcing their hand.
I don’t think that I can program worth a nickel, but this story sure is inspiring.
Hey Ivan, congrats from Nantes, come back when you want :)
Thanks, I loved it there! :)
I gave a talk in Nantes about making Photopea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
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.
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…
Sorry but the creators have such a disdain for any form user experience enhancements that I cannot give them a pass.
I think many of us really wanted it to succeed and tried to love it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t what most people want.
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.
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)
You have to keep in mind that for as many non gimp user asking for a change in gimp UI there are as many current gimp users who would not necessarily see it as a good change if it hurts their muscle memory and workflow.
For example when they introduced the single window mode as default, I view it as a regression only because people can't use a window manager properly or pretend to do professional stuff on what is just a glorified video game console OS with a shitty windows management. Thanksfully they kept an option to keep using multiple windows mode for us.
Well, I can understand the position of long time gimp users, but ultimately you have to move on to better paradigms and years of UX research. If you match it with a legacy mode, things can be a smooth transition.
In that time I used GIMP a lot and was a good moderate level user probably, but the interface kept getting in my way (unlike Photoshop were I was able to reach almost a flow state of doing things at that time)
Eventually I just moved on, but I can’t fully shake the feeling that GIMP could have been so much more. Godot and Blender which others mentioned just have done so much better in that regard. Blender had the suckiest of UX/UI but even in the face of much/some “old timer” resistance they made something that most hail as a success now.
Blender has indeed been a much more "slow overnight success" than I suspect GIMP will ever be, and that's unfortunate, because its not like GIMP is lacking in the potential.
As a GIMP user for 20+ years there’s no way I can defend them.
I've tried GIMP so many times over the years and yeah, it remains miserable to use. I wish it were not so.
A single person run project can enforce UX requirements much better than an open source project.
I agree with this. GIMP is powerful and a fine piece of software but it truly needs an enlightened UX despot to come in and clean house.
This seems to be the achilles heal of open-source, the inability to provide even half-decent UX.
"An open source project" can be anything, there are plenty out there which are solo endeavors that don't accept substantial contributions.
But I would agree that the classic model of big, slow-moving, design-by-committee open source projects have mostly yielded mediocre results.
Ditto Affinity Photo. Even paid programs are abysmal compared to Photopea.
Really? I heard Affinity Photo was great, though I haven't really used it.
It's pretty great. The whole Affinity suite is.
Photo is great but Designer still lacks fundamental features that users have been asking for many years. I haven't used Publisher.
Oh, I thought the GP meant that Photopea puts Affinity to shame, I see now, thanks.
Pixelmator Pro is the only acceptable comparable UI I've found (and performs a lot better than Photoshop).
Photopea's killer feature is the fact that it, for the most part, directly copies Photoshop's implementations of features. There's no learning curve because it's basically the same. On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.
No adjustment layers? That is like photoshop 101. That's pretty embarrassing for GIMP.
I didn't know what those were, but going by https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/adjustment-layers.h...
You can do all the same stuff in the gimp, but it's just a little more laborious (or a lot more laborious if you're used to photoshop already I guess). The gimp lets you easily do all the same transformations, copy and reapply transformations, etc. It seems like the adjustment layer keeps the original image and the transformations to make it easier to repeatedly tinker with those adjustments and reapply them more quickly, though.
Adjustment layers are a key part of a non-destructive editing workflow. Without them, doing professional work like retouching is much more difficult. GIMP's issue is that they don't seem to care about power user workflows.
People develop software for themselves and package it for others. What's wrong on it?
Once upon a time there was a fork called 'gimpshop' that added a PS-like UI to gimp. Clever idea. Warning - the current gimpshop domain hosts some scammer's adware-laden rip-off.
There's a recent alternative called PhotoGIMP that is trying to accomplish the same thing, not sure if it's based on the original GIMPshop.
I use Photopea at work precisely because of this. I know how to use Photoshop, but I don't have a license for Photoshop as an engineer, but I do sometimes need it. Photopea fills that role perfectly and it's almost a perfect drop-in replacement.
> On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.
Or even a layer palette with a list view that acts like a normal list view with e.g. shift-click to multi-select, like every list view on every platform has had for upwards of two decades by now.
Krita on the other hand is really great and getting better every day.
I'm all in on Krita and believe it will be the next Blender.
Blender and Krita are model examples of how to run FOSS projects. Excellent software and excellent projects.
Depends what your goal is. For a long time the GIMP people were pretty clear they just wanted to work on it in their spare time for fun. Ton on the other hand always had some very clear and much bigger ideas what he wanted to do with Blender. Is one way "better" or "worse"? I don't think so, it just depends on what your goals are.
When working with big complex applications, learning how to use them is no small investment. It's not a matter of which development methodology better or worse, what matters to me is whether or not I will see a return on my investment.
With Krita, Blender, Inkscape, Love2D, even Kate, I'm confident those time investments will be worth it.
With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.
> With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.
Why?
I unlearnt photoshop 2 decades ago (basically when I stopped being a teenager/young adult downloading pirate copy of softwares I can't afford) and got used to gimp and I never really missed the photoshop.
This is very believable, it is called disruption and is standard in software. Old companies (or projects) will have the legacy of older technology. That 100k LOC ... is a liability too. You have to get your head around it. Many heads. And to change it, you have to work on ... "it". Not what you dream it to be.
He's done a fantastic job. Meanwhile the GIMP still doesn't have a "Save As..." menu item, you have to go through extra steps using "Export". Just a symptom of the attitude the UI projects.
That's the same wth just a different name, what is the problem?
Maybe all the time looking for how to **ing save the first time, plus all the extra time clicking thereafter, plus the times you forget momentarily and take the wrong route again...
>vast amount of contributors over decades
Designed by by committee, through and through. The older I get the more it seem obvious not to do it, but other people keep jumping on to them.
USB, Bluetooth groups are responsible for some of the dumbest tech decisions in 20 years.
Gimp is a great idea but is a non-starter because of the incredibly disturbing name. I've never heard of photopea before today, but I'm sure glad there's a good alternative.
Edit: here’s what gimp means:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gimp
1. Derogatory term for disabled person
2. Insult meaning stupid person
3. Male sex slave
Could they possibly have picked a worse name? “Poor taste” is a huge understatement
So you can't use a software because of its name?
It would be offensive if that word was refering to someone. It doesn't. It refered initially to "General Image Manipulation Program" and now to "Gnu Image Manipulation Program". It is litterally in the front page of the Gimp website. It is an acronym.
Yeah but if there was a program called HITLER, NAZI, CRIPPLE or what have you, even if their names were acronyms, would you really not think twice about using it?
Congrats from reaching godwin point so early. The former 2 are not really the same scale as they refer to real events that occured, an ideology and agenda.
I don't think I would be annoyed by a software called cripple, especially if it also stands for something else through the acronym., I would probably take it as a joke on the potentially beta status of the software at some point in its life. Again it is not targetting anyone in particular, unlike the former 2.
Gimp is a permanent embarrassment of humanity itself. Literally the worst software I have ever used.
Wow, gonna have to completely disagree there
Gimp has been solving the need of users looking for an open source image editing software for decades. It has been used and forked as filmgimp, now cinepaint who has been used in the film industry.
Not really what I'd call an embarassment.
A triumph of mediocrity, re the UI. It's the incumbent so I use it for tasks and have for decades while longing for something else the whole while.
GIMP doesn't have that many contributors; it's hard to estimate the total contributors at a quick glance because so many committers only commit translation updates, but it doesn't seem more than about 20 over a 25-year period that have some serious (non-drive-by) contributions, all active at different times. Just 4 people seem to account for well over 75% (3 of which are no longer active). At the moment it's about 4 people, give or take, who work on it somewhat regularly.
Is the state of GIMP annoying and frustrating? Sure. Is it a failure to more effectively allocate resources to work on a fairly critical piece of software? I think so. But if you look at the technical side of things it's not that clear-cut at all. Remember that back in the day GIMP had to invent their own toolkit (GTK).
Being a webapp is probably an advantage here. What's the big thing for GIMP 3? The port to GTK 3. Does that really add anything for users? Not really, as such. But that kind of stuff is quite a big time-sink and doesn't really add any features. Same with the new build system, wayland support, i18n changes, etc. which doesn't really "do" anything other than keep the thing from bitrotting.
Photopea has had someone work on it full-time for over 5 years; if you put that against the evenings and Sundays that people work on GIMP, and consider all the "plumbing" they had to do that Photopea doesn't have to deal with then the differences in time spent are probably much smaller than you'd might suspect at a glance.
Gimp works really well.
GIMP has a neat feature called "Color To Alpha", which no other editor has (including Adobe Photoshop). I have added it to Photopea two years ago: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/2205