Photopea is a Free Photoshop Clone That Runs In Your Browser

Nov 08, 2018

Want a Photoshop-style image editor without paying any money and without downloading any software? Check out Photopea. It’s a free Photoshop clone that runs right in your Web browser.

What’s astonishing is the fact that the app was created and is being developed by a single person: Ivan Kutskir, a 28-year-old programmer based in Prague, Czech Republic. Kutskir spent 7,000 hours developing the app while studying computer science in college — about 5 hours a day for 3.5 years — and last month a whopping 1.5 million people used the app. Kutskir only recently started placing ads on the app and now makes a decent income from his project.

“Our goal is to create the most advanced and affordable photo editor,” Kutskir writes on the Photopea website.

The similarities with Photoshop go beyond aesthetics: if you’re used to using Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home with Photopea. You’ll find the same essential tools and the same workspace layout.

Photopea supports most of the file formats you’ll need, from JPG and GIF to actual PSD files. And yes, Photopea supports layers, so you’ll be able to do some pretty complex editing in the app if needed.

Other features found in Photopea include layer masks, blend modes, brushes, selections, and much, much more.

The items in some of Photopea’s drop-down menus.

Here’s a 4-minute review of Photopea by MakeUseOf that shows how the app works (and how similar it is to Photoshop):

Head over to the Photopea website if you’d like to give the online image editor a shot. You can also follow along with the project as well as suggest new features on its GitHub and Facebook pages.

P.S. Other popular browser-based editors include Lightroom for Web and Polarr.