Hi, my name is Ivan Kutskir, I am 31 y.o. programmer from the Czech Republic. I made Photopea, an advanced photo editor which works in a web browser. During 2021, it was used 120 million times, people spent 20 million hours using it, and opened 500 million files in it.

I started to work on Photopea in 2012 as a hobby, until 2016, when I graduated and started to work on it full-time. I started monetizing it with ads in 2017, I never had any other job in my life :)

I did an AMA here a year and a half ago, and I wanted to share what happened since then :)

Ask me Anything! :)

*** Follow Photopea on Facebook or Twitter! Proof: I put a link to this AMA here!

Comments: 1494 • Responses: 65  • Date: 

babsbreda1218 karma

Have you hired your first employee since the previous AMA?

ivanhoe901739 karma

Lots of great people got in touch with me back then. Thank you, Reddit! :) I ended up hiring a guy from Prague, who studied at the same university as I did. But it will take time until he gets familiar with my code.

mystiquetur996 karma

Congrats!

Besides it being free what other pros would you say using photopea vs photoshop is? Cons?

Where did the name stem from?

ivanhoe901869 karma

Thanks! :) There are three main advantages over Photoshop:

1) Photopea works everywhere (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebooks, Android, iOS, everything with a browser) ... here are statistics of usage 2) It opens probabyly 5x more file formats than Photoshop. E.g. you can open and edit PDF files (rewrite texts, edit vector graphics, change colors), SVG files, GIMP files, you can open and edit pretty much any image format. 3) Many Photoshop users say, that they often use Photopea simply because it starts faster. A website opens up in 2 seconds, while it takes 10 - 15 seconds to start Photoshop.

I named it Pea, because Apple was already taken :)

Untgradd1100 karma

Oh man this whole time I’ve been been pronouncing it in my head like “photo-pee-uh”, like utopia but with photo on the front. Yes, I am dumb.

… I am so glad I discovered Photopea, and then stumbled across this AMA so I could read this comment, all while social responsibility demands I not speak about it in person and thus out loud.

ivanhoe90732 karma

I think 90% of people pronounce it like "utopia", I don't mind it :)

I often feel like there is a little child giggling inside a person, which hears me saying "pee" in Photopea :) But I am afraid it will "wear out" after you hear it too many times.

mystiquetur139 karma

Thanks!

FYI my teenaged son uses Photopea and enjoys it a lot but he asked that I let you know he is having an issue using it from his chromebook as there is a loading bar (he says it’s from fonts not loading) that is blocking alignment tools and shapes he can place but he’s not having the issue from his phone or website on desktop.

Ha ha ha well photoapple doesn’t have quite the ring anyway,

ivanhoe90606 karma

You probably have a firewall, which blocks .otf files from loading. It could be set by your network administartor (a school, an employee).

But most probably, it is a browser extension, which is blocking it. See https://www.photopea.com/tuts/photopea-doesnt-work-what-to-do/

TitsAndWhiskey25 karma

What library do you use for pdf?

ivanhoe90237 karma

I wrote my own PDF parser according to the PDF specification. I know that document almost by heart and I wish I didn't.

CrackaAssCracka73 karma

As someone who wrote a pdf writer for work, thanks for the ptsd

ivanhoe907 karma

Add the PDF support they said, it will be fun they said.

Fibronacho533 karma

MAN! I'm a high school computer science teacher. I built my curriculum on accessibility whatever the financial means or the starting knowledge with computers.

Photopea is AWESOME. The kids get it real quick, they never fumble with the interface as with the open-source main alternative...

A cloud-based app means I don't start crying when we have to teach remotely as with covid... With kids using PC's, Macs, damn Chromebooks, there are not a thousand options!

So, when is Videopea coming out? ;)

Many, many thanks, you rock!

ivanhoe90319 karma

Hey, thank you very much! I will make sure to keep doing my best :)

BTW. I often see, that many schools buy 11-inch laptops with 2GB of RAM for their students, it is often enough for reading or typing. But if you can, please, give these kids at least 13 - 15-inch laptops, and more powerful hardware. The "Photopea experience" would be 1000x better :)

Fibronacho95 karma

I'm lucky enough to use decent 8gb ram ssd equipped desktops with large screens, so the kids have a decent workspace. It's no 3090 monsters, but it gets the work done!

My school board usually buys 13in. laptops for everyday use and it's enough for most of what they do with them.

At some point, it would be fantastic if you implemented local-drive libraries like in Lightroom, ever considered it?

ivanhoe90114 karma

When you go to Photopea, there is "This Device" on the left side. You can allow Photopea to access a certain folder in your computer. I am planning to extend it to a library-making tool :)

baracuda68499 karma

"Photoshopping" has become a popular verb...

Should we start calling use of this "peaing" ?

ivanhoe90457 karma

From what I have heard, at the moment, people are "photoshopping in photopea" (source). Adobe Photoshop exists for 30 years.

It would probably take a while until people start photopeaing in Photopea, or even photopeaing in Photoshop. Maybe in 2052.

voodoo_curse440 karma

How on earth is Photopea fully functional offline in a 2MB cached page?

ivanhoe90521 karma

2 MB is two million characters, that is a lot! And it is a compressed size :)

E.g. there are 166 icons of a size 160x160 pixels, they all have 131 kB (under 1 kB per icon). I often edit my code to make it smaller, I developed my onw Javascript minifier, and so on :)

jojow77433 karma

How does content awareness work? I just watched a tutorial for photoshops new content awareness function and you can literally take out a person and fill in the background with a couple clicks.

ivanhoe90530 karma

I made it back in 2017, here is an article

Basically, you need to look at image parts around the removed area, and use them as patches to fill that area. It is also called "inpainting" :)

LongusDickus426 karma

do people using ad blockers cause a significant loss in revenue?

ivanhoe90751 karma

According to my own measuring, about 22% of my visitors use ad blockers. I think it is not so bad.

Untgradd244 karma

I’ve been a programmer for a while and have devoted a decent amount of time to several personal projects over the years. I’m interested in how this project has matured, or what it’s been like to take something developed during university to what it is today.

Would you say it’s maintainable?

What has worked well and what has not?

ivanhoe90507 karma

Photopea was not my school project. I started it as a toy experiment, which I liked and I kept improving. I was spending lots of time on it, without making any money.

E.g. after four years of work, I have invested 7,000 hours into it, still making no money. If I had a job for $20 an hour instead, I could make $140,000 (a lot of money for a 25 y.o. me). I did not talk about it with my family or friends. I was afraid people would think I am crazy because of putting so much time into "my own project".

I gave a talk about Photopea two years ago.

Untgradd98 karma

Thanks for answering!

I did not mean to imply that you started it as a school project, but rather that you started it as a personal project early on in your endeavors as a programmer.

I’m not so much interested in the financials but rather the nitty-gritty of being the sole software developer responsible for a project like this.

In other words, I’d love to hear whatever insights you might have for other programmers who are maintaining, and hopefully publishing, their own software projects. What’s it like to evolve that sort of project over time? What did you do well at first and what would you do differently when it comes to your development workflow?

ivanhoe90265 karma

I wanted to say, that I was lucky. As a student, I had almost no life expenses, and there was no pressure on being profitable. I think that it is something most of developers can not afford, so they rarely try to "risk that much".

I offered Photopea for free, so I was not afraid of making mistakes. Nobody could complain or "force me" to change something, as they did not pay for it. Although, I have always repsonded to every request (eventually). And I always publish everything ASAP. I update Photopea around 20 times a week. You could not save your work in the first version of Photopea.

It is hard to talk about mistakes. I did some things a certain way, and I am not sure if it would be better or worse, if I did them differently. I often felt overwhelmed (e.g. I fix 3 issues a day, while receiving 8 new issues a day, for a whole week). I often feel that my code is so complex that I want to throw it all away. But the more you look at it, the more you realize that it is not so bad. When I am too lazy to do something properly, I end up doing it properly anyway a year later, because someone notices it anc complains about it. But it takes me 2x more time a year later :)

coreysnyder04217 karma

How is it possible that a single software engineer is building a product that competes with, and in some ways surpasses, an application that a major corporation and thousands of employees support?

ivanhoe90314 karma

When a softare company has a thousand employees, not all of them are developers. And even when you have 100 developers, it does not mean they will do 100x more work than a single developer :) It is not like 100 bakers baking cakes. It is like 100 writers writing one book. They must coordinate with each other, etc.

zachtheperson191 karma

This is insane! The paid version isn't quite as cheap as something like Affinity (calculated based on years-per-update vs. price per month) but I'm surprised how well this competes with both Affinity and Photoshop.

Really makes me wonder how Gimp is still trash. If you had a Illustrator/Designer alternative as well I'd finally be able to switch to Linux! Any plans for that?

ivanhoe90184 karma

Photopea was built around the PSD format (a native format of Adobe Photoshop), and it is much more capable of editing PSD files than Affinity Photo (every PSD feature is editable and correctly rendered in Photopea).

Photopea can do lots of vector editing now! There are certain limitations (e.g. no gradient meshes, no vector patterns), but it is sufficient for 95% of vector editing (you can open AI files, SVG, PDF, export SVG and PDF).

It is hard to tell if I ever find time to make a heavy-weight vector editor, but I never say never :)

dazedan_confused137 karma

Have you been in any trouble with Adobe?

ivanhoe90273 karma

Short answer: No.

Long answer: for most of people, Adobe Photoshop is the only advanced photo editor they know. But if you look at other advanced editors, you will notice, that they all look very similar. It is true, that many features of Photopea correspond to those of Photoshop, in order to provide a full support of a PSD format. But of course, I am always open for a discussion, if some company thinks I should not be doing something.

NoAttentionAtWrk102 karma

Yo I love your site! It has helped me more than a few times!

I didn't have a question but since auto mod is forcing me :

where do you land on the great "pineapple on pizza" debate?

ivanhoe90175 karma

Thanks a lot! :) I am 100% for freedom! A person should have a right to put anything they want on their pizza! :) I do not't mind when someone enjoys it.

RetroGamer215393 karma

Does is support Keyboard Shortcuts and Modifiers?

ivanhoe90142 karma

Yes, but I recommend you to try it yourself to be sure :)

Tuckers_Salty_Nips75 karma

Although I'm not familiar with it, I know GIMP is another free alternative to photoshop.

Is Photopea comparable to GIMP? If so, what advantage do you think you have over it?

Congrats btw! This is a super cool project.

ivanhoe90171 karma

The user interface of Photopea is more similar to Adobe Photosohp, than GIMP is. As most of people are familiar with Photoshop, they usually hate the interface of GIMP. But if you start using GIMP without knowing Photoshop, it can be fine.

GIMP is quite old and a large project. The larger the program is, the harder it is to make big changes in it. As I started making Photopea from scratch, I had no limitations, and could make it any way I wanted.

I think almost all features of GIMP are present in Photopea. But there are many advanced and important features of Photopea and Photoshop, which are not in GIMP.

There was this article from four years ago

Tuckers_Salty_Nips34 karma

Thanks for the info!

Follow up question, if you feel up to it:

Where did you get your coding experience / do you have any advice for making yourself marketable in the software field? I'm interested in this type of work but am not sure a $50,000 college degree is worth it nowadays...

ivanhoe9080 karma

I have no experience with "making myself marketable", I wrote my resume just once, a long time ago.

I think I received a good education. I was good at Math (best in class) since the elementary school, during my whole life.

Most of my computer-related education comes from the university. Universities are free in the Czech Republic (but you usually need to move to another city, pay rent there, buy food, your parents usually pay for it). But it is often hard to get to a good university (I would not get there if my Math was not excellent). My Math was average in our university class :D

I learned Javascript and web technologies in practice, by playing with it, it was fun.

experimentalphoto64 karma

Do you have your sights on any other side projects?

ivanhoe90168 karma

I have several ideas in my mind, e.g. about a video editor, but I often feel like it would be more useful to invest that energy into improving Photopea, rather than starting something new.

My "side project" was "Photopea Templates". It is supposed to be a "Youtube for templates". Anyone can upload their template and share it with others, you can comment templates, you see a number of views, etc. It was a bit different than my regular work on Photopea, but I enjoyed it :)

mak0193 karma

Please give the world a video editor like photopea. I bet a lot of content creators who are just starting out would be happy about the lower entry barrier.

ivanhoe90185 karma

I spent 9 years making Photopea, I don't know if I want to spend 9 more years making a video editor (I will be 40). I wish someone else made it :D

SirMcsquizy60 karma

Is there a place that I can ask for features?

I use Photopea all the time for work, however there is one feature that I wish you had.

Magic Eraser.

Is this something that's hard to implement or just something that hasn't be requested enough?

ivanhoe9062 karma

Sure! Go to www.Photopea.com , there is a button "Report a bug" at the top right :)

r_hagriid9952 karma

Thank you for all your time and efforts. I love your site.

If I may ask, what language/tools can one learn to do something similar as a project?

I'm not trying to imitate everything Photopea does but as a young programmer, would like to know what I should/could learn.

ivanhoe90140 karma

Thanks a lot! :) I recommend learning "the basics": Math, Math, Algorithms, Data Structures, and Math.

You can learn a new programming language or a new library in a couple of hours. At the end of the day, a real limit to what a developer can develop is their knowledge of Math.

By Math, I mean things like Calculus, Linear and other algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, complexity / computability theory and other computer-related math. You might not use it all in practice, but it will make you used to thinking about complex things, you will not be afraid of them.

I hope I did not scare you :) you can create lots of great things with a high-school Math, too. But there would still be many areas of computer science, that would be out of reach.

fukitol-48 karma

No question, just want to say I really like Photopea, and thank you.

Actually, I do have one question. Any chance it could be packaged as like an electron app? It seems you're halfway there with the offline app.

ivanhoe9076 karma

You are welcome! :) Go to www.Photopea.com and press More - Install Photopea. It will give you the "electron experience" without downloading anything. Even Ctrl+T works in it.

mr_seymour_asses45 karma

A huge THANK YOU from every Graphic Design teacher who had to scramble to find a way to teach virtually when all your students have Chromebooks! I could not have done my job without you and your work.

Question: Why did you decide to create Photopea?

ivanhoe9028 karma

You are welcome! :)

I used to make various "toy projects" for a web browser in 2012, and one of them was a viewer of PSD files. I gradually improved that viewer, until it became a full editor. You can read more here :)

The_Patriot36 karma

I can imagine my middle schooler loving the program - have any school systems reached out to you?

ivanhoe9080 karma

I think there are many schools all over the world, which use Photopea. I often see tweets from schools, like this one from today. Anyone can use Photopea, they do not need to reach out to me :)

norfolkdiver31 karma

Thanks for the info so far, any facility for colour correction for underwater photos? The white balance can be corrected (and there are niche products to automate this) but it would be good to have an all-in-one editor.

ivanhoe9032 karma

After you open your photo in Photopea, try Image - Auto Tone, or Auto Contrast. Otherwise, Photopea can do pretty much everything Adobe Photoshop or other editors can do.

The_Celtic_Chemist29 karma

I truly love your service and have turned several people onto it. Just yesterday I wrote an already well-received tutorial in your support forums about how to set Photopea as the default file handler for file types like .psd. I also want to say that I really appreciate you recently making the guides automatically go in numerical order.

That all said... Who do I contact about the slider for the brushes increasing consistently and not exponentially? For example, if I go 1/4 of the way up the slider, it's at ~30 px. If I go halfway up the slider, it's at ~135 px. If I go 3/4 of the way up the slider, it's at ~360 px. And if I go all the way up the slider it's at 1000 px. The window and the slider can always be bigger, but the slider is nearly useless to me since I have no way of mentally being able to click on the slider and have any idea where it will land. I want to ask if you would please fix this.

ivanhoe9031 karma

Hey, thanks a lot for your support! :)

I think an exponential slider makes more sense, i.e. each tiny step changes the size by 10%. It goes from 10 to 11, but from 100 to 110. Otherwise, it would be finer at high values (like between 300 and 500), but it would be impossible to switch at low values (between 1 and 50). If you want a precise size of a brush, you should type the number manually.

willydog1526 karma

Do you like becherovka?

ivanhoe9029 karma

I have tried it and I guess it's ok :D

notahouseflipper23 karma

If you are the sole brains behind the program, what happens if you get sick?

ivanhoe9063 karma

Photopea is a website and it will work for years or even decades, without requiring any maintenance. All I do is small improvements, but it would work without them :)

When I was sick, I am often bored, and end up with my laptop anyway :)

Ayyagaru22 karma

Hi Ivan. I love the site.

I've been using it since 2017. I can't afford photoshop license or can't risk my pc to any crack versions. Photopea came to my rescue. It is an amazing tool. It's simple and everything is right there.

And most of all, thank you very much for making it free. It's one of the very few sites I never had to use ad block on.

All my questions were already asked here. So, I just wanna say thank you for the tool.

Since the AutoMod gonna remove the comment if not a question.... How are you doing?

ivanhoe9023 karma

Hi, thanks a lot for such kind words! I am doing great, it is 3:55 AM here, but I am too excited about this AMA :) how are you doing?

mianori21 karma

What’s the biggest image size you support for editing? Any plans to increase that?

I tried to scale 3000x2000 to 6000x4000 and the site just freezes. Love the features though, awesome work!

ivanhoe9093 karma

I used to open 12,000 x 10,000 images in Photopea with no problems. I resized 5,000x3,500 to 10,00 x 7,000 just now, and it took around one second (bilinear interpolation).

The only limit is your RAM memory. Often, an old browser, or browser extensions, could cause problems. If you are sure your browser is OK and you have at least 2 GB of free RAM, we can discuss it here.

OmniaCausaFiunt19 karma

Whoa I have used Photopea for quick things, mainly for convenience but also just because buying Photoshop is not worth it for a casual/occasional user. It's such a good tool and as a fellow dev I really appreciate your work on it. It has a really clean UI and the ads aren't obtrusive. I hope you've been able to make enough off the ads to at least offset the time you have spent on it.

What did you code Photopea in, all JavaScript? No server so I guess there's no need for back end code... How do you end creating all the advanced features that Photoshop has to offer? Do you reverse engineer some of the features or already have an understanding of what it's doing on a granular level? If the latter did you already have an advanced skill set in Photoshop making it easier to break down what a feature is doing programmatically? I guess for me it's hard for me even think how I would tackle creating something like a gradient tool. I'm closer to a Paint user than a Photoshop user lol.

ivanhoe9025 karma

Yes, Photopea is only Javascript + GLSL (for the GPU acceleration). Many methods are obvious or well known (like the layer opacity, blend mode, gaussian blur, sharpening). I had to study specific areas of computer graphics to learn about advanced algorithms.

The Gradient tool is simple: you just loop through each pixel, and set its color a bit different than the previous color :)

oliviertjuh116 karma

TL;DR Releasing my first web app this week, what plaform do you recommend to score my first early adopters?

Three years ago I hired a developer to built a PoC of an app that improves the decision-making experience. Altough I’m experienced Product Owner, I wasn’t able to get him to finish the project within my budget. Since, I gained enough dev skills to build the (web) app myself, so took a couple weeks off and did it. I’m ready to release and would love your insights on what first step you’d take in going to market!

ivanhoe9033 karma

I am not used to do any marketing. It took me years to get to 1000 users of Photopea a day. In general, I posted it on Reddit, Hacker news, DesignerNews, etc.

grizzzlay8514 karma

Will you ever consider porting Photopea as an app for platforms like macOS, Windows, and Linux? I know you advocate pretty hard for this program to be web-based, but I mean, I'd pay good money for a lifetime license for this. I've been trying to understand Pixelmator on my Mac, and GIMP on my PC, neither really scratch the itch right for replacing Photoshop.

I just don't want to rely on an Internet connection to use your program. Hopefully you'll consider it down the road.

ivanhoe9030 karma

I really recommend you to try Photopea for at least 15 minutes. It works offline - I mentioned it in my post. It is no different than using Wikipedia, Youtube or Reddit. I don't know anyone who ever wanted an "offline Wikipedia".

rohlinxeg13 karma

I've been using your site for years, and I absolutely love it. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to get my company to abandon their photoshop subscription for your site.

Do you have a patreon? I'm sure plenty of people would love to support your work passively.

ivanhoe9012 karma

Thanks a lot! I want to give everyone "something in return". You can click "Account" at the top of Photopea and get a Premium account. It is not a subscription, you will not have to pay again after it runs out :)

-Tesserex-12 karma

How do you handle performance issues? A major app like photoshop will have libraries written in C, maybe even bare assembly if it really needs it, and it can use multithreading. How does photopea maintain reasonable performance doing complex operations on large files?

I'm a web dev myself, and I have a hobby project that involves image processing in JS. Some tasks are just awful even after many rounds of optimization. Do you use web workers (which never really suited my use case) or did you find some other magic you could share?

ivanhoe9031 karma

Modern computers do not run C or Javascript. They run the machine code. I think that today, both Javascript and C can be converted into a very efficient machine code, if you write your code right.

I do not use parallelism (web workers), but I do use the GPU through WebGL. Layer blending, adjustmens and many filters run on the GPU in Photopea. Adobe Photoshop and other programs also use the GPU, so they can be equally fast as Photopea.

E.g. advanced denoising of a 8 MPx image takes 1 second on a GPU, or 1.3 minutes on a CPU :)

mtgguy9998 karma

Given that’s it’s written in JavaScript correct me if I’m wrong but anyone can see the code. Do you ever worry someone will steal it and make their own site?

ivanhoe9020 karma

Every program consists of code, and this code can be seen by anyone. Usually, the original code is converted to a machine code, which is distributed to users. But still, anyone can read and modify that machine code (it is not as hard as you would think).

Similar thing is done with Javascript. The original code is converted into a different, unreadable Javascript, and we expect people will not be able to modify it. It is called Obfuscation).

Salt_Aspect_17628 karma

[removed]

ivanhoe9020 karma

Thanks! :) As there were no good image-editing libraries in Javascript back in 2012, I had to implement everything myself. Only about 10% of code of Photopea is made by someone else (e.g. JPG parsing, font shaping), the rest is written by me. I even wrote my own PNG and GIF parser, ZLIB (Deflate) decompression, OpenType parsing.

Some parts of Photopea are open-source as libraries at GitHub. I wrote an article about making a Gaussian Blur, which is quite popular.

Also, today, you can convert non-JS code into a browser using WASM.

meIsPri117 karma

Can u make it as an exe?

ivanhoe9051 karma

I never made any "exe". I think the web version is much better!

  • it takes no space in your computer, close the website and it is gone
  • you always use the latest version, no need to download updates
  • many people think "exe" would be faster, or more reliable, but it was true in 2004, not today
  • it works offline

broniesnstuff5 karma

Me reading this AMA: "Hmmm....I should bookmark this."

5 seconds later: "Oh...I have this bookmarked already??"

I apparently haven't used it yet! So here's a question: I was given a cheap drawing tablet for Christmas because I like to doodle and make dumb comics. Can I draw with my tablet in Photopea?

ivanhoe903 karma

I think you can, go and try it, it takes literally three seconds to open Photopea! :)

I have not tested Photopea with every device that exists, but the correct code is out there, so unless your manufacturers did not do anything very wrong, it all should work :)

DjBricheta5 karma

Congrats for all your work. I think I've discovered Photopea a few years ago and since then it's my go to on all work computers or any computer where Photoshop is not present. It was working flawlessly then and it only got better, so good job!

I have to be honest, I didn't follow Photopea that much to realize how many improvements it got over the years so I'm wondering: Do you have a newsletter/blog regarding the releases and updates of Photopea?

If not, would you maybe do one in the future? Niagara launcher had something like this, and it's much more nicer to read something like that instead of a release notes list, at least for me.

ivanhoe908 karma

Hi, thanks a lot! It feels amazing to hear such compliments :)

Go to www.Photopea.com . There are buttons for "Blog", "Facebook", "Twitter". You can click them and follow Photopea to learn about new features :)

2Zzephyr4 karma

Used (and still using) Photoshop CS6 for YEARS, (cracked, shhh) and I can't believe it doesn't open DDS. (All plugins I tried didn't work)

I had told a friend about Photopea months before, because they don't have Photoshop, and then one day I decided to, just for fun, try if Photopea opened DDS. And oh my god, it did. BLESS YOU!

Honestly my only question is if keybinds will ever be a thing? I'm SO sorry if it's already answered, or if they are and I'm unaware of it, I only use Pea for DDS, so not often at all.

But God knows how many times I'll CTRL+T to transform , but in Photopea, since it's web-based, it'll open a new tab and do something else and I'll just blink like "oh" . Or is there a way around keybinds? Like a way to disable browser keybind when on Photopea only?

Honestly I'm often tempted to move to Photopea for the rest of my normal editing stuff, and not just DDS. I think it's just out of habit of launching CS6 that I haven't yet.

ivanhoe905 karma

Thaaaank you! :) Photopea supports DDS for many years. And I have been improving it at least twice a year (fixing minor bugs).

There is an "eternal battle" between me and browser makers for the Ctrl+T shortcut. It started around 7 years ago, we exchanged dozens of comments, but it did not move anywhere. See here.

But now, you can use Ctrl+T in a fullscreen mode and in PWA mode. Otherwise, Alt+Ctrl+T always works in Photopea :)

BTW. Photopea has so many features that Photoshop CS6 does not have, but when you don't know about them, you don't know that you need them :)

nomajo2 karma

I've been using Photopea for years and not knowing a working shortcut for transform has been my only problem.

ivanhoe902 karma

Alt+Ctr+T , and once browsers fix it, it will be Ctrl+T .

Ninoqq3 karma

I’m currently working on getting my bachelor in computer science and I was wondering how you got the skills to develop such a project? What helped you outside of school to get here?

arneey3 karma

Did you ever do a major refactoring or updated the tech behind it? TypeScript instead of JS?

ivanhoe9010 karma

I do small refactoring all the time :) I never had a need to switch to a different programming language. It is the opposite - the more I work with JS, the more I like it. But my style of writing JS did not change in the past 10 years (I never use "const" or "let" :D).

TypeScript would be converted into JS anyway, so why not write JS directly.

But in general, I think the programming language is not important at all. It is like choosing a pen for a writer. Choose something you feel comfortable with.

rockaether3 karma

Love the app, and your active involvement in r/photopea answering people's questions. How much more earning growth are you seeing after you promoted it here since last time? Still no plan for a subscription model for school use?

ivanhoe905 karma

Thanks a lot! Last time I did an AMA, my traffic grew by about 5% for a couple of days :)

The Premium account has the same cost for everyone, many schools order a "Team of 50" version. I would like to offer discounts to schools, but I don't know how to verify if the user is from a school.

That-Albino-Kid2 karma

I just watched your seminar you linked. I’m curious how many users you have as of now? Your last update was 2019

Definitely going to try this out soon.

ivanhoe903 karma

It is hard to tell who is a user of a website. Is it a person who opened www.Photopea.com once in their life, or the one who opens it every day? It is also hard to tell, if the current visitor has visited Photopea before, or not.

Photopea.com is opened 10 million times a month, but it is hard to tell, how many different people open it. I think it is around 3 - 5 million different people a month.

matheod2 karma

Do you write yourself custom picture algoritm or do you only use freely avaible algorithm ?

ivanhoe902 karma

I wrote all algorithms myself, as I did not found any useful algorithms online. But I enjoyed writing them :)

Mycroft902 karma

If you are really from the Czech Republic, where's your accent?

ivanhoe903 karma

I enjoy saying ŘŘŘŘŘŘŘŘ so much :)

SidNYC1 karma

Is there a way to go premium without the subscription model?

I'm thinking something more traditional, you buy once, and say, you get a zip file, that you can unzip into a directory and run the html file in there.

ivanhoe907 karma

There is no "subscription" - we do not take money from you automatically.

You can pay for three months of Premium now, and after it runs out, ads will come back. You can pay again, if you want, whenever you want, for a period you want :) E.g. do not pay before summer, if you don't use Photopea during summer.

Walter_Steele1 karma

Should everything be free?

ivanhoe900 karma

I guess then, there would be no point in trying to make anything, because anyone would be able to take it from you, since everything is free (you can not ask money for it, or anything in return).

AutoModerator-7 karma

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ivanhoe906 karma

My post contains a proof - a link to Photopea, which has a link to this post: https://www.photopea.com/reddit.html