Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

14 days ago (github.com)

Hey guys, I am the creator of Photopea, I just woke up! I did not expect that it will blow up like this.

Thank you all for your support! Many repositories like this one exist on GitHub, I tried to report in in the past, but I was completely ignored by Github / Microsoft. I feel pretty powerless here :( I tried to call them out publicly - https://x.com/photopeacom/status/2106877355738140875

This "PhotoSuite" thing got me a bit angry, since the author presented it as an original work, when I clearly see that such a project can be made from my "pp.js" file in two hours using Claude. Also, I believe that their README.md did not mention Photopea before I wrote my first comment there.

Thousands of people shared "PhotoSuite" on social media and nobody minded the fact that they don't know who the creator is. The creator is still offering it on their website as their original work: https://www.photosuite.app/

We live in interesting times. AI can (or will be able to) de-obfuscate every bit of code that was ever published, convert binaries to readable C++ and so on. So, in theory, AI models will train on the source code that we consider "closed-source" now, and will be able to recreate this software if asked. But it wouldn't be possible if a real person did not spend thousands of hours of their life to write that software years sooner.

I have always been excided to see people make AI create something new, what didn't exist before. But so far, I mostly saw only "approximations" of expensive software, when AI tries to recreate each feature and each button according to what it thinks it should do, or "forks", when AI takes the full code of something and tries to "bend" it to hide the similarity with the original work.

  • >I tried to report in in the past, but I was completely ignored by Github / Microsoft.

    This is the second time we have heard this complaint in the last week. Previously it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832406

    It feels like we need to be more and more vigilant about relying on tools from these big technology companies. Especially if you are running a small business. They really don't give a shit about you unless you have enough pull to get on the front page of HN.

  • > But so far, I mostly saw only "approximations" of expensive software

    Genuine question: isn't this what photopea did to photoshop?

    • > isn't this what photopea did to photoshop?

      There's no evidence the PhotoPea author ever decompiled PhotoShop binaries. He emulated a desktop program's functions, menu structure and look in a web app by writing original code. Even if you had the PS source code, delivering a PhotoShop-like experience in a web page requires a lot of original work (especially in 2013). Before PhotoPea, Adobe had said that making PhotoShop browser-based would be extremely difficult, if not impossible and never be performant.

      PhotoPea proved that with enough work and skill it was possible. Having an LLM coding agent look at PhotoPea itself and turn it into a copy of PhotoPea and then representing it as your own work is not at all the same.

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    • Yes, and I totally support it! They start "from zero" and build everything piece by piece by testing the input / output of each feature. I just hope they use Photoshop / Photopea / Other software only from the users perspective and not by analyzing the code (source code or "binaries" - it probably does not matter to AI nowadays).

      In this case, it was a clear copy-paste of my code, whith the variable names changed by the AI.

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If your answer to "here is an example of 1:1 copying of my code and I can do the same for every line in your app" (Github comment 7, from the Photopea author) is to copy/paste a justification from an LLM (comment 8, from the Photosuite author), you've lost the argument.

The hard reality though is any site written in JavaScript is now part of an LLM's training set and can (and will be) be trivially rewritten into something new. Interesting times.

>“He who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins. […] For the earthquake—it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains.”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  • > those defaults have earned their place here even though the format doesn't require them

    > the reader emits the model's shape rather than the file's

    Oh hello Claude

    • I had the same exact thought from the paragraph above that when reading:

      > the writer derives its field count from Object.keys().length while skipping the sentinel

How bizarre. The thief has already deleted the thread. So obviously guilty just by the fact that it's clearly a browser app inside a desktop wrapper. That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision. And it uses all of Photopea's libraries. Before the thread was deleted, they had spawned a few sub‑agents to come in and bully the Photopea creator. But none of it was believable; it was clearly an angry thief lashing out.

  • That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision.

    It makes a lot of sense architecturally. It's much simpler to update a webpage than force every user to update their app when something needs to change. Consequently a lot of apps, especially on mobile, use a system webview with a page loaded from a server and rendered to look like the app for anything that gets regular updates. The alternative is having lots of versions of the page and needing to manage all the different variations of payloads from them.

    Backwards compatibility in an API isn't that hard, but when there's a simpler option (a webview) people will take it.

    That said, if there's no native stuff in the app, it is a bit harder to justify.

    • I can imagine ten alternatives with much better architecture.

      This kind of thinking is what brought us the trend of painful Electron apps like Teams.

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    • > It's much simpler to update a webpage than force every user to update their app when something needs to change.

      The set of capabilities available to native desktop apps is a superset of the capabilities available to browser-based Web apps.* Ergo, if browser-based app distribution possesses some desirable quality, the same path is available** to a native app not built on W3C/WHATWG APIs.

      * You can frequently come across people make a similar logical error in the opposite direction when it comes to being more distrusting of browser-based apps than native binaries, especially with an undue focus on the risk of the app exfiltrating your data over the network—even though a native binary can do strictly more damage than a browser-based app, which is at least confined to its sandbox and the associated execution model.

      ** It does require, though, that one actually take that path.

      2 replies →

    • “It's much simpler to update a webpage than force every user to update their app when something needs to change”

      That much is true, but I consider this misfeature a clear disadvantage for the customers using the app, which are at the mercy of the developer. The days of updates being something positive are long gone. Nowadays they’re a mix of UI redesigns requiring relearning stuff, spyware, unwanted bloat, bugs and a couple of actually useful things thrown in.

    • That's all wonderful until some dipshit decides to cut features because they were too much of a maintenance burden. At least with the desktop app you can push back and not update.

All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.

  • Can confirm he is not AI and he also used to hang around here. Also before photopea, he tried to make a living once with a open source project, a flash replacement graphic libary for the web, called IvanK.

    So that did not work out, but I used it a bit and interacted with him couple of times there, before moving on to easel and later pixi, after it became clear it would not take off and the other ones had more support.

    Glad for him to found success with Photopea later, and he definitely has my sympathy here.

    But I doubt this will work out much longer in the long run. It is just too easy cloning and improving projects with AI.

  • > People were calling it an actual open source alternative

    Photopea is not, and has never been open source, AFAIK.

  • Was it ever open source? Thr github repo doesn't contain any sources...

    • Indeed. As others have pointed out as well, it's not open source. I thought it was just minified JS that can be downloaded and run offline. I've never used it because I prefer to self-flagellate by using GIMP.

  • I fully support him and Photopea, but come on. It is clearly in every single way a Photoshop rip-off. There is no denying it by reasonable people.

I wonder if the issue is being responded to by an agent. A lot of the responses sound like stuff Claude writes.

seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.

the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.

[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w

[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...

  • I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.

  • I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.

    I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.

    • Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.

      1 reply →

    • yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.

    • LLMs have changed the obstacle of doing something from (time, attention, expertise) to (time, attention, tokens).

      I don't see what's unique about GTA6. It's just larger in scope if you wanted to decompile or greenfield a custom engine.

      But at the end of the day you'll be able to unpack the assets yourself and immediately have the worldmap running in a browser in Three.js. And once you're there, you can vibe-code any game you want on top of it.

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Isn't this a pretty obvious case I mean the author is not even hiding it just check the readme. They found illegally extracted photopea code then used AI to copy it. How are there any doubts on this?

I find it hardest to sympathize with the guy who inserted himself with 'Adapt or Die'..

  • > Eolix has OPENLY cited he used Photopea for inspiration and what parts he used, he's acted with honesty.

    He's the definition of the word "bootlicker".

    "But he admitted to killing him, he's innocent!"

I mean, it seems a pretty open-and-shut case. The author literally admits he copied the code. From one of the comments he makes:

> @kuckir, to be clear about the lineage: PhotoSuite started from the Photopea build mirrored at https://github.com/ruanjiyang/Photopea-Offline, and the README credits Photopea as the primary inspiration and prior art. Over the past year it's been rewritten and rearchitected module by module, retargeted for desktop, restructured into ~330 source files, with a lot of features Photopea doesn't have. It's a rewrite of that lineage.

That Photopea-Offline is an unofficial rip of the actual app. Pretty sure using a pirated version doesn't suddenly grant you license rights to use & extend the code into another competing product...

  • I was about to say this. Even if the offline version was an authorized thing, there was no license attached to the project, meaning full copyright.

  • Absolutely. There’s a lot of this going around on twitter too with all the game reverse engineering with all the AI grifters claiming games are all open source now etc. Yeah right, I don’t think they understand the concept of open source or copyright!

moments ago I saw a reddit post that claimed to have cloned several adobe applications and open sourcing them on github, is this the one?

edit: it's not, the reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1wxmqpt/ive_created_o...

and github repositories

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator)

https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere)

https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom)

https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro)

https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects)

https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign)

  • These are absurdly fast compared to the molasses originals.

    • You’ve tried them out? I’m intrigued but haven’t had a chance to sit down and give them a shot. I’m particularly interested in how the vector one performs and how well it works.

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We need much more of these type of direct call outs! Shed light on the AI grifters so the community knows what projects to avoid like the plague.

It's embarrassing to be honest. The eolix guy couldn't even respond to the very first piece of evidence by the Photopea creator, before spewing some clearly and poorly generated, LLM response. So of course he'd resort to issue-closing, title-changing, banning, bullying and then Whatabout-ism.

Beautiful rainbow of moral failures...

Goodluck with that "internal audit" buddy. The internet never forgets.

A side note: I wonder what pre-Microsoft Github would do in such cases. I don't think I've ever seen modern Github take action against any clone repo with legitimate copyright issues.

photosuite maintainers could just have ai adjust the code "In the style of X" and get around any argument if copy/piracy. The laws haven't caught up here. I can't imagine how anything could be enforced. Also there's cleanroom as a service :shrug: open source software effectively has no license for someone with tokens to spare.

I don't like it but thats the situation on the ground IMO

The photoshop like UI doesn't bug me. I'd want to know where the code came from. If it started with Photopea's code, an AI rewrite doesn't really change that.

[flagged]

  • Half of these are extremely permissive license attribution issues. Seems rather tame, no?

    > 4.4. Paper.js (ext1790438722.js)

    > Upstream Project: Paper.js (by Jürg Lehni & Jonathan Puckey)

    > License: MIT License

    > Specific Violations: MIT Condition: The MIT License mandates: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." The entire ~200 KB Paper.js library is embedded in minified form with all author names, copyright notices, and license text stripped.

    I question the seriousness of the author of "Photosuite". Who goes through the trouble of creating accounts to prove poorly, that they "didn't steal code".

  • Since that audit is just some hours old and clearly completely AI written - may I ask if you have looked into it yourself to make such claims?

    Or rather created it and eolix is your other alias?

  • I have no affiliation with anyone in this drama. I heard of Photopea before but never used it. I just opened it to check for attributions and did not find any at all. So if the - possibly fueled by lower motives - accusations about OSS license violations are indeed true, IMO Photopea lost any right to complain about people copying their product.