Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions
the5to9.xyz
the5to9.xyz
• 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
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!!
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."
I also asked him if he considered creating his own header bidding system, but he said this wasn’t worth it
Have a look at the 'Advertising' section.
Still surprising how much as revenue they’re generating
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.
Wow, even GIF!
Quick history lesson:
1987: GIF invented (Wilhite)
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/s2elpv/i_made_a_free_...
Given it's a Javascript program I'm not sure how Photopea solves those problems with Adobe Photoshop other than cost.
It also "boots" almost instantly, and doesn't require installing anything other than a browser.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version]
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.
Photopea just works.
I love this concept, I just worry about people stealing it.
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 thought that was odd because while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source [1].
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."
Quite the understatement. Photopea isn't open source at all.
It wont gain more features but it is an alternative.
I gave a talk in Nantes about making Photopea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
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.
It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.
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.
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.
But I would agree that the classic model of big, slow-moving, design-by-committee open source projects have mostly yielded mediocre results.
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.
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.
I'm all in on Krita and believe it will be the next Blender.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not really what I'd call an embarassment.
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.