Photopea, examined end to end

Reference · Browser image editing

Compiled and independently verified by the photoedit.in editorial team · Last reviewed 4 November 2026 · Every claim traced to a primary source

Photopea is the most complete image editor that runs inside a web browser without an install. It is a single-developer product, it is free to use with advertising, and it opens Photoshop files with a fidelity that no other browser tool approaches. That combination makes it genuinely important for anyone who works with images on a budget, and it also makes it easy to overestimate: Photopea looks like Photoshop, so people assume it behaves like Photoshop in the places where it does not.

This reference exists to close that gap. It is not a marketing page and it is not a tutorial series. It is a structured, chapter-by-chapter inventory of what Photopea actually does in late 2026, where the boundaries are, and which workflows it should and should not be trusted with. We built it because the questions we get from photoedit.in readers are rarely "what is Photopea" and almost always "will Photopea do this specific thing for me" — a question that generic reviews answer badly.

What Photopea is, in one paragraph

Photopea is a proprietary, advertising-supported raster and vector image editor that runs entirely in a modern browser. It was created by Ivan Kutskir in Prague, developed privately from 2012 and released publicly on 14 September 2013. The current stable line at the time of writing is version 5.6, released on 26 September 2024, which added 16-bit and 32-bit colour depth with GPU acceleration, JPEG XL and HEIC support, PSD-in-TIFF handling and improved progressive web app behaviour. Files are processed locally on the visitor's device rather than uploaded to a server, which is the single most important architectural fact about the product and the reason it is safe for confidential client work.

The five-minute verdict

If you only read one section of this reference, read this one. The table below is the compressed judgement; each row is expanded and evidenced in the chapter it points to.

Who should use Photopea, and who should not

The honest answer is that Photopea is excellent for three groups and mediocre for three others. It is excellent for people who receive PSD files and cannot justify a Photoshop subscription, for web and UI designers who need to open Sketch, Figma or XD exports and pull assets out of them, and for anyone who needs to convert between the forty-odd formats it reads without installing anything. It is also genuinely good at quick retouching: the healing brush, patch tool and clone stamp behave the way a photographer expects.

It is a poor fit for colour-critical prepress, for a professional RAW pipeline, for animation production, for teams that need simultaneous editing, and for anyone whose workflow depends on commercial Photoshop plugins. Those are not edge cases; they are entire job categories. Chapter 19 sets out the full decision matrix with the evidence behind each line.

How this reference is organised

There are twenty chapters and they do two different jobs. The first twelve walk through the application the way the interface is laid out, from the canvas inward: navigation, files, layers, selections, retouching, painting, filters, vectors, colour, AI, automation and export. Chapters thirteen to eighteen are an exhaustive inventory of the editor itself — the menu bar item by item, every tool slot and options bar, every dock panel and panel control, every modal dialog and its fields, every filter with its parameters, and all twenty-seven blend modes with the formulas they implement. If a button, slider or menu entry exists in Photopea, one of those six chapters names it. Chapter nineteen is the limitations and decision guide, which is where most readers should start if they are evaluating rather than learning. Chapter twenty documents our sources and the method we used, including the places where sources disagree and we could not resolve the conflict.

Key numbers at a glance

How we verified this

We worked from three tiers of evidence and labelled them differently throughout. The first tier is Photopea's own documentation, its developer blog and the developer's replies in the public GitHub issue tracker; those are treated as authoritative because the developer is the only person who can state how the product behaves. The second tier is independent testing and reputable reviews, principally PCMag's hands-on review and the Chrome for Developers case study, which we use for corroboration and for behaviour that documentation does not describe. The third tier is community reference material such as shortcut lists and user reports; we use it only for details that are low-risk and independently checkable, and we say so where we do.

Where the sources contradict each other we say so rather than picking the more convenient answer. The clearest example is self-hosting: Wikipedia reports self-hosting at $500 to $2,000 per month, while two secondary reviews state flatly that Photopea cannot be self-hosted. Both can be true if the Wikipedia figure refers to a white-label distributor account rather than a traditional deployment, and chapter 11 explains why we think that is the most likely reading. The offline capability claim has a similar shape and is examined in chapter 10.

Frequently asked questions