Photopea
In-depth reviewFull-featured photo editor in your browser — opens and saves PSD, XCF, Sketch files. Layers, masks, filters, blend modes. A genuinely free Photoshop replacement that needs no install.
Not sure how to add Photopea to your home screen? Step-by-step for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge — it takes about ten seconds, and there is no app store involved.
Own Photopea? Have us re-run this measurement — we open it in a real browser, cut the network, and send you what survived.
How to install Photopea as a PWA
Screenshots
Why we recommend Photopea
Photopea is the closest browser-based clone of Photoshop's interface that exists — and that's the deliberate point. The keyboard shortcuts are identical, the panels (Layers, Channels, Paths, History) sit exactly where you'd expect, and the file-format support is genuinely impressive: native PSD read/write (including layer styles, smart objects, masks, adjustment layers), GIMP's XCF, Sketch's .sketch, Affinity's .afphoto, plus the obvious PNG/JPEG/SVG/AI/PDF. For freelancers, students, and anyone who needs to open a client's PSD once a quarter without paying $20.99/month for a Creative Cloud subscription, it's a genuine replacement. The single creator (Ivan Kutskir) has maintained it solo since 2013 — that's both the charm and the risk: no roadmap committee, but everything ships when one person decides. As a PWA, it caches the entire 7MB app on first visit, so subsequent loads are offline-capable. The only limitation is that the codebase is closed-source (it's free as in beer, ad-supported), which differentiates it from GIMP/Krita.
Best use cases
Best for: opening a PSD a client sent you when you don't own Photoshop, making quick layer-based edits to product photos, batch-resizing images with the script panel, removing backgrounds with the magic-wand+refine-edge workflow, and teaching a Photoshop class without making students pay for licenses. The PWA installs cleanly on Chromebooks, which is a unique fit for K-12 design education.
Honest limitations
Not for: anyone needing the latest AI features (Generative Fill, Neural Filters) — Photopea's AI tools are competent but lag Adobe by a generation. Not for: agency teams who need shared libraries, version history, or commenting (no collaboration features). Performance on huge files (>4GB PSDs with hundreds of layers) is constrained by browser memory limits, typically maxing around 2-3GB. The site is ad-supported on the free tier — Premium ($5/mo) removes ads.
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