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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

By the way, PhotoSuite is just a stolen copy of my project www.photopea.com , which I have been working on for 8 hours a day for the past ... 14 years? :D

It was discussed here on HN yesterday and then, the anonymous person behind it removed the "Issues" section completely from their Github

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730

https://replayweb.page/?source=https://archive.org/cors/gith...

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Never got to try out PhotoSuite, looks like it really was just ripping-off your code, the repo owner already deleted it, and now it forks PhotoCraft.

I have a huge respect for your work on Photopea, been using it constantly since the time I completely moved to Linux a year ago. It has the best Photoshop parity yet to find! Would you ever consider to: 1. Open sourcing your work (partially or completely) under some kind of a permissive/copyleft license. 2. Rewriting some parts of the website that require performance as WASM targets. 3. Using any modern JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte.

Thanks a lot!

1) About 30% of my original code is open-source as JS libraries: they end with ".js"-https://github.com/photopea?tab=repositories

2) WASM is not faster than Javascript "by default". Both can be fast or slow depending on how you write it. I don't think having everything in WASM would make Photopea significantly faster. Also, Photopea uses many libraries as WASM (WEBP decoding, ZSTD decoding, JPG decoding, Harfbuzz, ... JXL / AVIF encoding)

3) I never used any Framework, but if it is just a bunch of a JS code, I think I managed to write an equally good JS code for the UI over the past 14 years.

Hey, thanks for photopea. I use it frequently.

Can you settle an argument, perchance? Is it pronounced "Photo-P" or "Photo-pia" (as in "utopia")?

It is the question I get asked the most. I pronounce it "photo-P", but I am the minority :D

https://x.com/photopeacom/status/1492164676200841227

Thanks for answering, I've been wondering the same as I scrolled past these HN stories.

I had settled on the utopia sounding version but will try and think of peas now.

Oh my god that's hilarious. And thank you!!

https://xxcancel.com/photopeacom/status/1492164676200841227

Photopea is a great tool. I am sorry about the ripoff by PhotoSuite.

Hey, huge fan and user of photopea. You are not far behind the VLC guy, u/jbk in my personal world view :)

If I may ask, if you were to do this all over again in 2024 - 2026, would you choose SSR?

Dumb q from someone who has done mostly native dev for…19 years, whoa.

Wouldn’t that screw up his whole thing? Because now you need infra to render to free users?

yeah it would. an SPA is exactly what you'd want for a "webapp" like this, where you want everything loaded upfront so that you're mostly interacting with stuff offline. it's also very cache friendly so, really no benefit to using SSR.

SSR only really makes sense when you either want to optimize for fast page loads, or do PHP-style conditional rendering or whatever

I get that, but isn't that model dead now? Doesn't this whole drama prove it? Is there any way to protect an SPA from ~"Hey Claude, de-obfuscate this, then clean-room design our app in another session" in 2026 - and then apply better marketing - without even knowing anything about code? Doesn't this apply to all client-side & native code? Gaming companies are very aware of this.. claude + ghidra + bevy is going to kill all IP protection for games. Their attempt to stop this is why there is no more physical media.

As another browser example along the lines of Photopea, ScreenRun is amazing as a true one-time pay, client-side app. I have loved that thing ever since I paid the $50. Such a cool app and model that has no server costs. Whoever made that is also my hero. But aren't those days now over? I guarantee there are >100 ripoffs of it now. Isn't an SPA now just basically open source, in the worst way only?

Meanwhile, Photopea.com only works via a website for normies. It is ad-supported, so given all the work put in, and updates, and the fact that it is web served... wouldn't SSR be a better option? (I hate this reality)

edit: I am allergic to Next, so I have been using Sveltekit since I realized that SPAs are now accidental open source. What have others been using for SSR and why? That is the discussion I would really like to have.

OK, I have thought about this more and I realized that I have never worked on compute intensive apps like Photopea, so I am truly ignorant here. I also did only SPAs forever, and I am now only learning about SSR and hydration. I guess if there was a truly server-side rendered Photopea, using React something like React Server Components, it would probably not be supportable by free + ads. It might actually cost at least as much a month as the inspiration of the app.

I guess my point was, how can anyone protect any client-side IP in the modern era?

This would be very heavy to put on the server, the bills would be insane.

I remember using your tool a lot for years but in the past year or so the ads have made it unusable. It feels more like browsing ign.com with no adblock or something. Just brutally slow and intrusive visually speaking.

+1 from another Photopea user here.

And at 8 Euro a month I can't quite justify the Photopea premium plan.

I use it enough I would happily pay say $50 for a self-hosted single user license that will not get updates. But not 8 euro a month forever.

I am finally forcing myself to un-learn the decades of Adobe muscle memory and replace it with gimp/krita. Or maybe I'll vibe up something that does exactly what want and nothing more; bespoke one-off tooling is just so easy to do now.

14 yesrs - amazing work. Graphics is some of the most rewarding work in coding.

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