Interface and navigation

Chapter 01 · Interface & navigation

Reviewed 4 November 2026 · Sources: Photopea navigation and artboard documentation, PCMag hands-on review

Photopea's interface is a deliberate reproduction of the classic Photoshop arrangement, and that is the single most consequential design decision in the product. Anyone who has used Photoshop for a decade can sit down in front of Photopea and start working without instruction, because the tool panel is on the left, the context-sensitive options bar runs across the top, the canvas sits in the middle and the panel stack is docked on the right. The muscle memory transfers, including most keyboard shortcuts. What transfers less well is the flexibility: the panel system is fixed in ways that Photoshop's is not, and there are structural limits on how many documents you can look at at once that no amount of familiarity will paper over.

Panel layout and what you can change

The left tool rail, the top options bar, the central canvas and the right-hand panel dock are all present and behave as expected. Panels for Layers, Channels, Paths, Properties, Brushes, Character, Paragraph, History, Actions and Paths are opened from the Window menu and stack in the right dock. Layers, History and Properties are the three you will use constantly; Brushes and Character are the two you will open for a specific task and then close again.

The difference from Photoshop is that panels cannot be freely placed anywhere on screen. In Photoshop you can tear a panel out, float it over the canvas, collapse it to an icon strip, or spread panels across a second monitor. Photopea keeps them in the dock. For a single-screen browser workflow this is mostly an advantage, because it prevents the slow drift into a chaotic workspace that afflicts most long-term Photoshop users. For anyone who has built a carefully tuned multi-monitor layout, it is a real regression, and it is the first thing power users notice.

On the free tier an advertising panel occupies space beside the canvas. It is not overlaid on the artwork, so it does not obstruct work, but it does reduce the effective canvas area and it can shift the layout when an ad loads late. Premium removes it. Chapter 10 covers the practical consequences, including a documented case where ads interfered with the clone stamp cursor.

Zooming and panning

Navigation is where Photopea's Photoshop mimicry pays off most clearly, because the zoom and pan gestures are identical and they are fast. The Zoom tool sits on Z; clicking zooms in, and you toggle the direction in the options bar or by holding Alt while clicking. Holding Ctrl and Space temporarily switches to the zoom tool from whatever you were doing, and releasing returns you to it. Holding Space alone temporarily activates the hand tool, which is the gesture most people use a hundred times a session without thinking about it.

The wheel does three different things depending on modifier. A plain wheel scrolls vertically, Ctrl plus the wheel scrolls horizontally, and Alt plus the wheel zooms. This is worth internalising early, because the alternative is reaching for the zoom tool and losing your place in the image. Ctrl with + and - steps the zoom level, and Ctrl+1 jumps to 100 per cent, one image pixel per screen pixel. There is no dedicated 100 per cent button in the interface, which is a small but persistent annoyance for people who check sharpness at native resolution constantly.

Rotate view

The Rotate View tool rotates the document around the centre of the screen without rotating the artwork itself, which is the feature digital painters rely on to draw a comfortable stroke angle. A Reset button returns the view to zero degrees. This is a small feature that signals who the product is for: it exists because illustrators asked for it, and its presence is one of the reasons Photopea is taken seriously by people who draw rather than only retouch.

Rulers, guides, grid and snapping

Rulers are toggled from View > Rulers or with Ctrl+R. Dragging from a ruler with the Move tool creates a guide, and guides are document-specific, so each file keeps its own. The grid is different: it is shared across all open documents and its size is configured in Edit > Preferences. The pixel grid is a separate one-pixel-gap overlay that only appears when you are zoomed in far enough to see individual pixels, and it is the tool that makes pixel-art and icon work possible.

Visibility is controlled from View > Show, where Guides, Grid and Pixel Grid each toggle independently, and View > Extras hides all of the non-printing overlays at once. Snapping lives under View > Snap and can be set to snap to guides, grid, layers, document bounds or any combination. Snapping applies to the Move tool, Free Transform, Crop, selections and the vector tools, which matters more than it sounds: alignment work that would take a minute of nudging becomes a single drag.

History and undo

History is presented in the History panel, and clicking any state reverts the document to that point. Step backward is Ctrl+Z, or Alt+Ctrl+Z; step forward is Shift+Ctrl+Z. There is a subtlety worth knowing: the plain undo shortcut toggles only between the last two states, so pressing it twice returns you to where you started rather than stepping back two operations. To walk backwards through several steps you need the step-backward command or the panel itself.

History depth is not published as a fixed number, but it is finite and it is one of the things Premium improves, doubling the number of steps retained. In practice this matters most during long retouching sessions with many small brush strokes. If you are doing that kind of work, either save intermediate versions or accept that you will run out of undo before you run out of patience.

The single-document limitation

Photopea displays one image window at a time. You can have many documents open, and they appear as tabs, but you cannot view two side by side. This is not a setting you have missed; it is a structural property of the interface, and it has real consequences. Comparing a retouched image against its original, matching colour between two photographs, or dragging a layer from one file to another while watching both requires switching tabs rather than looking at both at once.

There are workarounds. You can place both images as layers in a single document and toggle visibility, which is how most people do before-and-after comparison anyway. You can open the second image in a separate browser window, which gives you two independent Photopea instances but also two independent histories and no way to drag layers between them. Neither is as good as a proper multi-window view, and for anyone coming from a dual-monitor Photoshop setup this is the limitation that hurts most.

Themes, languages and preferences

Photopea ships a dark and a light interface theme, and the interface is translated into 42 languages, which is remarkable for a product built by one person. Preferences are stored in a browser cookie named _ppp and, if you are signed in, synchronised to the server so they follow you between machines. That cookie-based approach is why clearing site data resets your workspace, and why a different browser profile feels like a fresh install.

Artboards

Artboards are the feature that makes Photopea credible for interface and social-media design rather than only photo editing. An artboard is, in the developer's own description, a document inside a document: a top-level layer group with its own clipping rectangle, its own background colour and its own ruler origin. The Artboard tool draws new ones, and existing artboards can be resized, duplicated with a plus control, renamed or deleted.

The behaviour that makes them useful is the ruler and guide handling. When an artboard is selected, the rulers reset so that zero is the artboard's own top-left corner, and any guide you drag attaches to that artboard rather than to the canvas. That means you can lay out three social posts of different sizes in one file and have each one measure from its own origin, which is exactly how you want to work when producing a set of assets. The Properties panel shows exact artboard dimensions, so you can verify a 1080 by 1080 export without guessing.

Artboards are also how Photopea handles imported design files. It detects artboards in Sketch, XD and Figma documents and preserves them as artboards rather than flattening everything into one canvas, and it converts each page of an imported PDF into an artboard. For anyone who receives design handoffs, that behaviour alone justifies keeping Photopea installed as a progressive web app.

What this chapter means in practice

The interface is Photopea's strongest asset and its clearest constraint at the same time. If you are doing single-document editing on one screen, the fixed panel layout and the Photoshop-shaped workspace are faster to learn and harder to clutter than the alternatives. If your work depends on comparing documents side by side, on a tuned multi-monitor layout, or on remapping shortcuts to a non-English keyboard, you will feel the edges of the design quickly. Chapter 12 covers the shortcut customisation gap in detail, and chapter 19 sets out which of these limits should change your tool choice and which are merely inconveniences.