Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project | Hacker News Reader

Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

github.com

193 pointsmontag126 comments

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.

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

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

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.

I use photopea every day. I can only imagine the complex emotions you're going through. I am not nearly as attached to my software, I imagine, just because of how "unimportant" it is.

I am still very attached to it though. For no good reason other than "it's mine", I think.

Isn't it a good thing software can't be closed? We have to use someone's tool though, and ego is inevitable, so idk? 100s of separate "open source" versions and people use what they think is the best?

Is it just about accountability? and having an author/human attached to the product to direct it? Choosing the person you have the most faith in?

/rambling

> 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.

>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.

That is really awful :( I tried posting about it on X, but I shouold probably try HN. https://x.com/photopeacom/status/2106877355738140875

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.

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.

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.

I'm curious as to these alternatives you can imagine. If you can elaborate.

> 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.

“ 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”

Not a logical error. A notarized or app store app can be blocked from accessing the network so there is no data exfiltration happening. The malware risk is negligible thanks to Apple’s vetting.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_doctrine>

“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.

Maybe this isn't the exact same situation but it still kinda reminds me what happened around Notepad++ 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006445

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.

> improving

That's a dangerous word. Did you mean adding more features?

More useful features is usually what people call improving.

"useful" does a lot of heavy lifting here. More features != more useful

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.

what is the difference between "ripoff" and "fairly feature-comparable alternative"?

I find Photopea to be completely legitimate, and ripoff is too strong, but you can recognize that it's not just a "fairly feature-comparable alternative". It has most of the functionality at the exact same place, with the exact same shapes, because that will help user if they already know how to work with Photoshop. That makes Photopea a well-executed clone, one that has been reimplemented on another platform from scratch.

It's a clean room implementation of Photoshop features and UI. That's not a ripoff. Just like Wine or Mono aren't Windows ripoffs.

Does this mean that every mass-produced automobile is a ripoff of the Ford model T? Is Gimp also a ripoff? Paintshop Pro?

I’m with you in spirit, but please don't bring up gimp in this context.

It’s like mentioning your nephew is pretty good at the piano, when people are discussing if John Williams was copying Holst.

Ouch

It's a reimplementation.

A rip off would be using the actual Photoshop source code.

> People were calling it an actual open source alternative

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

Thanks for the correction. I thought it was just minified javascript.

Just to clarify, Photopea is not open-source software.

Yeah, I was mistaken. Thanks for pointing that out.

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

Nah, I'm real

That doesn't preclude their point from being true.

Why not just apologize and have Claude rewrite any code that's similar? Whether you did it intentionally or not, you probably agree that you can't keep using his code and that it would pretty bad if someone did something similar to you.

"Nah"?

I suspect we're dealing with a child here with a cloud code subscription who isn't quite familiar with US copyright law or software licenses yet.

You‘ll suspect that from a single word? The people on this site man.

Cloud code?

You’re an absolute loser.

It definitely sounds like Claude.

The GitHub issue is now a 404.

Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20261006025310/https://github.co...

Issues removed, and a notice: Currently running an internal code audit.

"Gosh, did my LLM just copy Photopea? Lemme see"

„Let me ask my LLM“

Archived Thread: https://replayweb.page/?source=https://archive.org/cors/gith...

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.

that would be the absolute dream imo. true ownership of the code running on your system.

It isn't true ownership if you depend on an LLM you don't own to modify the code in ways you don't understand. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.

That's a pretty high bar.

By that standard, couldn't I say you don't truly own open source software like Chromium or OpenSSL because very few are capable of understanding the codebase well enough to implement changes?

That's always been the bar for FOSS, we've just failed as a community at education because we became elitist and decided the muggles didn't actually deserve to understand anything. The end goal of the free software movement should be that everyone has that understanding, that code literacy should be as essential as reading and math. But yes, in short, you don't truly own code you don't understand. Simply having the code available is better than not, but a freedom you can't exercise really isn't a freedom, and all of the freedoms of free software presuppose the ability to comprehend software.

And there's a difference between few being capable of implementing changes, and anyone. In a world where most or all code is written and edited by LLMs, and CS courses are focused on how to prompt LLMs and no longer on fundamentals, the opportunities for humans to learn programming will all but vanish. And this assumes LLMs will even expose code at all. They may simply emit precompiled applications in the future. If humans remain in the loop even when LLMs are used then this becomes less of a problem. But the culture around LLMs converges on vibe-coding - as little direct human understanding or effort as possible. As such it converges on sacrificing freedom for convenience.

Doesn't that seem exaggerated when clearly people are gaining the freedom to modify any software easily and quickly?

Last week, I've seen videos of people merging video games like Super Mario and Minecraft to create absurd new games that previously you wouldn't imagine anyone implementing because the cost/effort was prohibitive.

>Doesn't that seem exaggerated when clearly people are gaining the freedom to modify any software easily and quickly?

No, because they aren't modifying the software, a proprietary service is modifying the software. The freedom belongs to the company owning the LLM, not the person using it. If the freedom belonged to the person using it, then they would be able to exercise that freedom without an LLM. As they cannot, they did not in any way gain freedom by using the LLM.

If you think remixing games using an LLM is cool, I don't want to take that from you. It just isn't FOSS. The wholesale contempt that so many AI users have for human coding demonstrates that it's an entirely different culture with different ethics and different goals.

> The wholesale contempt that so many AI users have for human coding demonstrates that it's an entirely different culture with different ethics and different goals

Personally I enjoyed building apps before AI, and have been doing so professionally for 10 years.

With AI it's much more fun for me since productivity is way up.

It's not that I have contempt for human coding, I just know from my own experience and hard work that using AI is much more productive.

People online constantly make comments where they insult my expertise and the quality of what I am building. Surely you can see how this could quickly lead to a heated discussion.

Who is going to write that software if there is no reward.

To make sure that AI never uses your work (source code or binaries) for training, I see two possible solutions:

- the software would run only on your own server and clients will access it remotely through an interface

- you will sell the software together with the hardware and a proprietary operating system, which does not allow anyone to get the ones and zeros of your software

So, the only way to prevent GTA6 being "decompiled" and "forked" by AI models is to run it remotely (with a video interface), or sell it together with a proprietary console :D

most oss is written with the expectation of no financial reward. there is more to life than money.

not to mention there are alternative revenue sources anyways.

>most oss is written with the expectation of no financial reward.

Most open source software is written by corporations which have a complimentary motive. Think hardware manufacturers writing drivers because it makes their products more saleable or Google writing Go because they needed a systems programming language.

Could you please mention the alternative revenue sources.

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.

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.

I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything

[0] https://github.com/Open-BFME/

love to see it

btw this is the actual solution, not that whole stop killing games movement. not regulation.

It doesn't stop the need for the other things.

there is no need for regulation here (which comes with both known and unknown second and third-order effects) since we can use llms to preserve games

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.

Six months is a long time! I was honestly prepared to see more aggressive timelines when I wrote this comment :)

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.

At the very least, it will be a binary that hasn't yet been consumed by the LLM, so it's an interesting test!

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?

"Illegally extracted" might be a strong phrase. All you need to do is open the website in a browser

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 vote that guy first for the 'Die' bucket!

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...

And the comment where he's "explaining" the code is clearly LLM written. Very nice.

Also, he started by lying. He/she went from

> That's a bold accusation. Would you care proving which bits of the code are "stolen"?

https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77#issuecomment-5...

to banning photopea, to when photopea responds with a 2nd account re: some duplicate code which is very hard to explain w/o being, well, duplicated to what you pasted above.

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!

Such a basic mistake treating any repo as free use. That one’s clearly a rip of copyrighted code.

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.

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.

they don't work at all

They actually do work now. Very well. I know, because I have been using them for the last 5 days.

Maybe they weren't very good when you wrote your comment, but now they are awesome.

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.

Mediocre people using tools that let them feel not so mediocre.

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.

The OP link returns 404 now.

https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77

Eolix has issues with issues, they don't exist any more in the Github project.

Archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20261006032338/https://github.co...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com