[HN Gopher] Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app
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Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app
Author : sanroot99
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-09-02 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.photopea.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.photopea.com)
| lukax wrote:
| Every once in a while I need to edit an image on macOS.
|
| I used to open GIMP, wait on the loading screen for 3 minutes so
| that it rebuilt the font cache ("Looking for data files: Fonts
| (this may take a while)"), open the image, use Cage Transform
| (wait 30 seconds for it to process the image), save to my home
| dir, because on recent versions of macOS it does not properly
| handle permissions to write in Documents folder ("Could not read
| the contents of Documents").
|
| Now I open GIMP, remember that Photopea exists, quit GIMP, open
| Photopea, drop the image, transform it (every time I'm surprised
| at how fast it is for a JavaScript app) and just export the image
| to my Downloads folder.
|
| I'm so happy I don't have to use GIMP anymore.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Photopea is amazing, but for more complex edits on Mac OS I
| started using Pixelmator Pro and it's miles better than
| Photoshop's increasingly bloated and slow experience. I
| genuinely don't understand how Photoshop has gotten worse since
| the CS3 era, it's baffling.
| postscapes1 wrote:
| +1 This tool is amazing.
|
| I also heard Neil Patel on a podcast saying he tried to acquire
| it for $10M+ and the developer declining the offer
| whoibrar wrote:
| I've been using this on/off for sometime. I've realised must of
| my editing is very basic and this has been overkill for little
| tasks as adding text overlay and cropping.
| benj111 wrote:
| Is this pronounced 'photo pea' or 'photope a'?
| alberth wrote:
| It's also created by a single person who generates over $1M in
| annual revenue.[0]
|
| He's also commented on HN about it.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.failory.com/interview/photopea
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769141
| agluszak wrote:
| I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for
| saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing
| revenue. Revenue != usefulness in general (I'm not saying
| that's the case here)
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Most of us have a ~/Code folder full of useful things that
| bring in $0, so I don't think there's much revenue==utility
| conflation happening here.
|
| It's just that building something that brings in good money
| by yourself is something just about everyone wants to be able
| to do. It's an interesting story when people pull it off,
| especially another HNer.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me
| for saying that, but I think that we should really stop
| glamorizing revenue._
|
| Understand your perspective but what's happening is that many
| programmers -- including _non-founders_ -- on HN are drawn to
| factoids of devs making money without "working for the man".
|
| Many examples of this that repeatedly resonates with the HN
| audience: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix
| =true&que...
|
| So instead of characterizing it as "glamorizing revenue" ...
| think of it more like... _" if that programmer found a way to
| make money outside of a corporate job, maybe I can too."_
|
| So Ivan Kutskir being able to get significant revenue while
| just being a 1-man operation will naturally be an interesting
| case study for programmers who dream of a little financial
| freedom.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Isn't that a litmus test for a successful idea? People
| breaking out their wallets and paying for it?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Commercially successful idea.
| http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ probably much more
| successful that https://www.gnupg.org/ but there's a
| nuance.
|
| Photopea is awesome on its own though. I really like to
| showcase it as an example of complete web app.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| The fact that a single person is generating that amount of
| revenue from this clone is a fact I find both relevant and
| interesting. I'm not sure there's any particular evidence
| this is being "glamourised".
| amjd wrote:
| Then what would you glamorize? I'd think that in a free-
| market economy revenue is a pretty good proxy for usefulness
| too in most cases.
| DrBoring wrote:
| I like to think of it this way:
|
| Revenue != Usefulness (to the users of the app)
|
| Revenue == Usefulness (to the recipient of the revenue)
|
| Analogy to non-software biz:
|
| 1. CandyCo buys ChocolateCo
|
| 2. CandyCo changes ChocolateCo recipe to use less expensive
| ingredients, generating new revenue for CandyCo, but less
| tasty chocolates for ChocolateCo's long time customers.
|
| 3. The new revenue has disparate usefulness for the two
| interested parties.
| seydor wrote:
| In this case it is both. And i think people who work for
| BigCo have no idea how hard it is to make money outside the
| monopolies they work for.
|
| I m not sure the creator of Photopea is a "founder" of
| anything? It's still an one-man show
| dathanb82 wrote:
| The most impressive part to me is how much snappier it is than
| Photoshop running locally on my machine.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| There's another online photo editor which has got a very similar
| GUI once you get past the rather garish and awful looking title
| screen: https://pixlr.com/e/
| metadat wrote:
| Photopea is a remarkable thing, so much functionality in only a
| few megabytes! Why is Adobe Photoshop so bloated?
|
| Unfortunate the licensing model means Photopea is not FOSS and
| not available in a proper self-hosted form (e.g. a docker
| container):
|
| https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/4870
|
| https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/1565
|
| (They do have a channel for you to email them and request [beg?]
| an API key license thing, see:
| https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts#self-hosted)
|
| I wonder if anyone has compiled GIMP to Wasm yet..
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > They do have a channel for you to email them and request
| [beg?] an API key license thing
|
| Doesn't sound like you need to beg, just pay.
| desindol wrote:
| It's a solo dev...
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I can highly recommend using an app like "Web Catalog" (MacOS)
| to containerise it into its own separate application. I have
| photopea set up like this and it's very handy.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| What's unfortunate about that? The (single!) author of this
| software deserves every dollar they make for the thing they
| made, software doesn't need to be open source to be good
| software.
|
| If you want to stand up your own private copy, contact them and
| arrange a fair contract where you pay them a large and entirely
| reasonable amount of money in exchange for a non-transferable,
| non-competing license to run a private, offline instance.
| metadat wrote:
| Good point. Thank you @TheRealPomax.
|
| The phenomenon of projects existing and being openly
| available on GitHub has somehow led to me having an
| inappropriate expectation about them being FOSS. I accept
| it's a "me" problem.
| spoils19 wrote:
| I wouldn't back down in your scenario, as RMS says, all
| software should be free, implying that it should be open
| for us to change as needed.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Just because someone says it, doesn't make it either
| true, or even sensible as "this is how it should be".
| Unless you can back up that statement with strong
| arguments (which RMS can't, ideology doesn't pay real
| world bills, and unlike RMS, the rest of us don't get
| paid lavish speaker fees) appealing to authority does
| nothing to strengthen a position.
| diroussel wrote:
| Just because RMS says it doesn't mean it's true.
| metadat wrote:
| The author doesn't owe the general public a FOSS product.
| The source is already freely available, which is better
| than nothing.
|
| For a relevant example, consider Adobe- they are actively
| hostile to sharing source code. Complete capitalist
| jackasses, yet Adobe doesn't generally get a hard time
| about it on HN or elsewhere.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It's unfortunate that:
|
| - you can't learn its techniques
|
| - you can't improve it
|
| - you can't fix it
|
| - the author could change their mind about distributing any
| part (or whole) of it at any time
|
| - the author may include undesirable features
|
| - the author could sell the software to someone who does the
| above
|
| - the software is limited in its reach to those who can
| afford and have a possibility to pay for it
|
| Of course, the author deserves every dollar for the time they
| spend making the software. It's unfortunate if they have to
| restrict the software to do that.
|
| There is a whole philosophy about Free Software:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| The real question is: "why do you feel you need to do that
| with everything you use"? If there's something missing, or
| broken, just report it. Or in the ultimate freedom: think
| you can do better? Whip out that VS Code and start making
| your own open source Photoshop.
|
| As for "the software is limited in its reach to those who
| can afford and have a possibility to pay for it", do you
| even use this app? Because it sounds like you don't, you're
| just commenting on it as a drive by HN reader. Everyone
| with internet access who wants to use this web-based "I
| can't believe it's not Photoshop" can do so for free.
|
| It's free software. Just not open source.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| It's not free software, it's freeware.
| nestorD wrote:
| This has dropped all my needs for Photoshop down to zero (I use
| it about once a month for things that range from tweaking a
| picture for someone to cleaning up an illustration for a book).
|
| It is great, I recommend it a few times a year, and my only hope
| is that the author has plans to open source it if he ever gets
| hit by a bus.
| tmdh wrote:
| Could there be any legal trouble for making a clone of Photoshop?
| rikroots wrote:
| Photopea has been mentioned several times on HN. When this
| question was raised before, I think the answer was that the
| layout of Photoshop is not protected by copyright, thus the
| Photopea author is within his rights to use it as inspiration
| for his product.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Is it an _exact_ copy? Or just another image editor?
| xsmasher wrote:
| Gimp is an image editor, but not a "photoshop clone" - a lot
| of interfaces and features are different.
|
| Photopha is a very near clone; all of my "muscle memory" from
| photoshop works fine in Photopea, including must keyboard
| shortcuts. Everything is where I expect it to be. I don't
| think those arrangements of features are copyrightable,
| though.
| xeromal wrote:
| Photopea has been ongoing for quite some time. I've thought the
| same but maybe adobe doesn't care
| rolisz wrote:
| And not only that, but as far as I know the solo dev behind
| Photopea has been contacted by the Photoshop team to work
| together on some format. Unfortunately, i can't find the
| quote right now.
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