Open-source image editors in 2026
30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. PhotoCraft leads with 76k stars, ahead of Graphite. 27 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (14), GPL-3.0 (9) and Apache-2.0 (3). Commercial image editors are listed separately.
New this season
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1
PhotoCraft storytold
PhotoCraft: An open-source, photo editor written by scratch in pure Rust
Complete system Experimental You want to try a native open-source Photoshop-style editor and can accept missing features.
★ 76k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
2
Redlamp pdcgomes
A native, open-source RAW photo editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone that feels immediately familiar to Lightroom users.
Complete system Experimental You are a photographer on Apple Silicon who wants to follow an open Lightroom alternative early.
★ 367 MPL-2.0 Swift Active, pushed today -
3
CalibRaw Duecki1
Free, open-source RAW editor for Linux, Android, Windows and macOS. GPU-accelerated, non-destructive, with masks, HDR merge and local AI.
Complete system Experimental You want a free RAW developer that also runs on Android.
★ 258 GPL-3.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
4
React Image Editor unlayer
Image Editor Component for React — crop, resize, filters, draw, text, shapes, stickers, frames, and an AI Assistant
Integration Usable You already use Unlayer or want a polished image editor component and accept a commercial back end.
★ 263 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 6 days ago
All open-source image editors, ranked
Complete systems you can adopt 24
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1
PhotoCraft storytold
PhotoCraft: An open-source, photo editor written by scratch in pure Rust
Complete system Experimental You want to try a native open-source Photoshop-style editor and can accept missing features.
★ 76k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
2
Graphite GraphiteEditor
Community-built comprehensive 2D content creation appplication for graphic design, digital art, and interactive real-time motion graphics powered by a node-based procedural graphics engine
Complete system Experimental You want to experiment with procedural, non-destructive 2D design in an open-source tool.
★ 28k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
3
ImageToolbox T8RIN
🖼️ Image Toolbox is a powerful app for advanced image manipulation. It offers dozens of features, from basic tools like crop and draw to filters, OCR, and a wide range of image processing options
Complete system Production-ready You want one free Android app for nearly every image manipulation task.
★ 15k Apache-2.0 Kotlin Active, pushed today -
4
Darktable darktable-org
darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer
Complete system Production-ready You shoot raw and want a free Lightroom alternative.
★ 13k GPL-3.0 C Active, pushed today -
5
Krita KDE
Krita is a free and open source cross-platform application that offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital art files from scratch built on the KDE and Qt frameworks.
Complete system Production-ready You want a professional-grade painting app without a subscription.
★ 11k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
6
PixiEditor PixiEditor
PixiEditor is a Universal Editor for all your 2D needs
Complete system Usable Indie game developers or artists want a free editor for sprites and simple animation.
★ 8.1k LGPL-3.0 C# Active, pushed today -
7
RawTherapee RawTherapee
A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program
Complete system Production-ready You want fine control over raw development and do not need library management.
★ 4.3k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed yesterday -
8
Pinta PintaProject
Simple GTK Paint Program
Complete system Production-ready You want a lightweight Paint.NET-style editor on Linux or macOS.
★ 4.1k MIT C# Active, pushed yesterday -
9
Nomacs nomacs
nomacs is a free image viewer for windows, linux, and mac systems.
Complete system Production-ready You need a free viewer that opens many image formats quickly.
★ 3.3k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
10
Jspaint 1j01
🎨 Classic MS Paint, ＲＥＶＩＶＥＤ + ✨Extras
Complete system Production-ready You want a simple familiar paint program in any browser.
★ 7.9k MIT JavaScript Slowing, pushed 4 months ago -
11
Capcap realskyrin
⌘⌘ - A lightweight, native macOS screenshot tool that lives in your menu bar. Double-tap ⌘ Command to capture any region of your screen — instantly copied to clipboard, or annotate first with pen and mosaic tools.
Complete system Usable You take many annotated screenshots on a Mac and want a free, fast tool.
★ 1k MIT Swift Active, pushed 4 days ago -
12
GimelStudio GimelStudio
Non-destructive 2D graphics editor (POC)
Complete system Experimental Only to study node-based image editing design.
★ 855 GPL-3.0 Dart Active, pushed 4 days ago -
13
FerrumPix Bitpainter75
FerrumPix is a desktop photo management and editing application for Linux, Windows and macOS.
Complete system Experimental You self-host photos on Immich or Nextcloud and want a desktop app to manage and edit them.
★ 745 GPL-3.0 Visual Basic .NET Active, pushed today -
14
ClearPDF Chethan616
Open-source Android PDF and document toolkit with PDF tools, Office viewing, XLSX editing, scanning, and image editing. Built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
Complete system Usable You want an open-source all-in-one document app on Android.
★ 433 MIT Kotlin Active, pushed 3 days ago -
15
PaintFE kylejckson
A lightweight image editor for Windows, MacOS, Linux with a focus on intuitive use and modern UI design. Features layers, filters, brushes, selection tools, color adjustments, animated images support, and a built-in scripting. Single portable executable (or web build), no install required.
Complete system Usable You want a Paint.NET-like editor that runs without installation on any desktop OS.
★ 413 MIT Rust Active, pushed 3 days ago -
16
Textual Paint 1j01
:art: MS Paint in your terminal.
Complete system Usable You want to draw ANSI or ASCII art in a terminal for fun.
★ 1.1k MIT Python Slowing, pushed 8 months ago -
17
Klecks bitbof
Web-based painting tool powering Kleki.com
Complete system Production-ready You want a free browser painting tool, or to embed one in a community site.
★ 388 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 13 days ago -
18
Redlamp pdcgomes
A native, open-source RAW photo editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone that feels immediately familiar to Lightroom users.
Complete system Experimental You are a photographer on Apple Silicon who wants to follow an open Lightroom alternative early.
★ 367 MPL-2.0 Swift Active, pushed today -
19
BitMappery igorski
Browser based non-destructive image editor with layering, masking, animation timeline, spritesheet editor, customizable brushes and cloud storage integration for all your online editing.
Complete system Usable You want non-destructive layer editing in a browser, especially for sprites.
★ 347 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed yesterday -
20
Pixelitor lbalazscs
A desktop image editor
Complete system Usable You want a cross-platform free image editor with many filters and are fine running Java.
★ 268 GPL-3.0 Java Active, pushed yesterday -
21
AlcedoStudio zidage
Open-source RAW photo processing and digital asset management software.
Complete system Experimental You want an open-source RAW workflow that handles large medium-format files.
★ 264 GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
22
HyCanvas hyscaler
Open-source Canva alternative you can self-host: graphics, slides, video, whiteboards and docs. AGPL-3.0.
Complete system Experimental A marketing team wants Canva-like design work on its own servers and can tolerate an early project.
★ 260 AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed 5 days ago -
23
AfterFrame YIWANG3
Local-first photo library for Mac and Windows. Browse, cull and search thousands of photos and RAWs, find people and places on-device, and edit with LUTs, text, stickers, camera frames and collages. Agent-ready over MCP.
Complete system Experimental A photographer wants fast culling and light editing of large exports without a cloud service.
★ 260 MIT JavaScript Active, pushed today -
24
CalibRaw Duecki1
Free, open-source RAW editor for Linux, Android, Windows and macOS. GPU-accelerated, non-destructive, with masks, HDR merge and local AI.
Complete system Experimental You want a free RAW developer that also runs on Android.
★ 258 GPL-3.0 Rust Active, pushed today
Building blocks for your own system 4
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1
Vue-fabric-editor ikuaitu
快图设计-基于fabric.js和Vue的开源图片编辑器，可自定义字体、素材、设计模板。fabric.js and Vue based image editor, can customize fonts, materials, design templates.
Building block Usable You are building a Canva-style design or product customisation feature and want a Vue starting point.
★ 8k MIT Vue Slowing, pushed 3 months ago -
2
ZLImageEditor longitachi
A powerful image editor framework. Supports graffiti, cropping, mosaic, text stickers, image stickers, filters.
Building block Production-ready Your iOS app needs a ready-made photo editing screen.
★ 634 MIT Swift Active, pushed 14 days ago -
3
ProImageEditor hm21
The pro_image_editor is a Flutter widget designed for image editing within your application. It provides a flexible and convenient way to integrate image editing capabilities into your Flutter project.
Building block Production-ready A Flutter app needs a customisable image editor without building one.
★ 397 BSD-3-Clause Dart Active, pushed today -
4
React-native-image-marker JimmyDaddy
React Native image watermarking for iOS, Android, and Web — text, logos, tiled layers, batch Recipes, invisible traces, and an optional interaction editor.
Building block Usable Your mobile app must watermark photos before sharing or uploading.
★ 369 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed yesterday
Integrations 1
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1
React Image Editor unlayer
Image Editor Component for React — crop, resize, filters, draw, text, shapes, stickers, frames, and an AI Assistant
Integration Usable You already use Unlayer or want a polished image editor component and accept a commercial back end.
★ 263 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 6 days ago
Templates and starters 1
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1
Photo-editor-luts-swiftui khanhuitse05
🎨 An image editor using SwifUI & muukii/Pixel
Template or starter Experimental You are learning to build a filter-based photo editor in SwiftUI.
★ 525 MIT Swift Active, pushed 5 days ago
Compared head to head
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Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 18. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Strong copyleft: 9. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
- Weak copyleft: 2. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
- Network copyleft: 1. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
Languages
TypeScript 5, Rust 4, C++ 4, Swift 4, Kotlin 2, C# 2, JavaScript 2, Dart 2, C 1, Vue 1, Visual Basic .NET 1, Python 1 and Java 1.
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