16 Top Free Self-Hosted Web Photo and Image Editors
Photo manipulation and image editing programs like Photoshop, and GIMP are often desktop applications. However, photo editing can also be done through the web browser.
Many web-based services offer photo editing for a price, which requires only an internet connection, a web browser, and an account.
Although they seem limited compared to desktop programs, web-based image editing programs have proven to be reliable for many users.
In this article, we present a collection of free web-based open-source image editing solutions that you can download, install and run on your local machine or server.
Here is our list:
1- Photo-Chrome
Photo-Chrome is a browser-based image editor built with the Angular framework.
The app features images browser panel, and several image editing tools like cropping, cloning, flipping, filter, text, and shape mask tools.
Photo-Chrome comes with many preset filters which are: sharper, emboss, grayscale, vintage, sepia, Polaroid, and many other advanced filters to modify colors, noise, blurring, and brightness.
Shape mask tools enable using different shapes for any image as a mask with opacity control.
Pipe-Runner-Lab2- BitMappery
BitMappery is a web-based non-destructive photo editor that is closely similar to Adobe Photoshop.
BitMappery uses Vue, Vuex and offers multi-language support using Vuel18n.
With BitMappery, you can have advanced layers editing and manipulation, selection tools, many brush options, and image transformation tools.
BitMappery offers a smooth interface that works smoothly on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
igorski3- miniPaint
miniPaint is another browser-based image editor that uses HTML5 with seamless drag-and-drop functionalities. Currently, miniPaint supports many image editing tools and a rich set of image effects and filters.
The user interface of miniPaint, resembles Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and other professional image editing programs, but in the browser. It is also responsive and works seamlessly on tablet screens and with full-screen support.
miniPaint offers file export to many popular image formats which include PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and BMP. It also supports the WEBP file format.
viliusle4- SnapLab
SnabLab is an image editor web app that uses OpenCV (Open Computer Vision framework) library and Flask Python framework.
The SnabLab comes with many tools, effects, and filters. It can be installed and self-hosted on the localhost or a server.
We did not have a chance to try this app yet, but it looks promising.
ashish-mj5- Photo Editor web
This is another open-source photo editor web application that works seamlessly with all modern web browsers.
Onur Ertugral, a Turkish developer, created it using React web framework and Node.js technologies.
This Photo Editor app is a simple one, that comes without filters and effects like other programs, but it supports resizing, cropping, text editing, rotating, and flipping.
You can also adjust the brightness, contrast, blur, and saturation with a smooth slider tool.
After you finish editing your photo, you can download it or even email it to an email of your choosing.
OnurErtugral6- nuophoto
The nuophoto app is a web-based application for photo editing that is built with JavaScript using Angular framework with Bootstrap CSS framework.
It uses the PhotoJShop library for photo editing and processing.
The package works for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers.
aurbano7- PhotoJShop
The PhotoJShop is a JavaScript photo editing library for developers to create image editing web applications.
It comes with a dozen filters and effects out of the box. It plays well with other JavaScript frameworks and libraries like jQuery, Angular, and React.
aurbano8- Flieroboto Image Editor
If you are a developer and want to integrate image editing functionalities into your web app, this is the 3rd application on this list that you can use.
9- Toast.ui Image Editor
Toast.UI is an open-source JavaScript library built to ease the developer's work. The image editing library is one of these.
Toast.UI comes with a complete editor with a user interface that works smoothly on Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.
It is easy to integrate Toast Image editors with any JavaScript project.
Unlike other projects, this one offers Vue and React wrappers alongside their plain JavaScript library.
nhn10- Darkroomjs
This is yet another JavaScript image editing library. It is a popular project that has been used for years because it is a framework-agnostic library.
Under the hood, Darkroomjs uses the FabricJS library to manage images in HTML5 canvas.
Unfortunately, the library has been discontinued.
Darkroom is released under MIT License.
MattKetmo11- Photoeditor
Photoeditor is a simple image editing library that comes with many features out-of-the-box.
Like some libraries on this list, the Photoeditor developer, released it under MIT License.
tribalmedia12- Java Image Editor
Java Image Editor as its name suggests is a cross-platform Java-based image editor. Users can install it on Windows, Linux, and macOS also can run it through their browser using Java applet.
Java Image Editor is a fairly old project, which has proven to be reliable among Java developers for many years.
Beyond its rich features and cool interface that resemble Adobe Photoshop, it features an extensible architecture via its developer-friendly plugin system.
The Java Image Editor is a simple image editor built using Swing and the filter classes found on this site. Originally written as a test harness for my image processing classes, it's now become a fully fledged application.
Features include:
- Multiple image layers
- Brushes: paint, clone, erase etc.
- Blending modes - add, screen, darken etc.
- Transformations: scale, rotate, shear, perspective
- Lots of effects and image-processing operations
- Reads and writes multiple image formats
- Extensible via a plugin mechanism
13- FileRun for images
FileRun is an open-source self-hosted cloud file manager. It helps you sync, backup, upload, and organize your files in the cloud.
Of course, your photos are among these files, so FileRun developers offer special treatment for photos as a built-in basic image editor, image tagging, image metadata extract support which view it in the information panel.
FileRun features an automatic image thumb generator for virtually all image file formats. It also categorizes and searches images by the metadata it extracts from all image files, even Adobe Photoshop file (PSD) format.
It also supports RAW file formats.
Although, its image editor is basic, hey it is a cool one. It is an ideal solution for designers and photographers who want to share their photos with simple editing.
14- PlanetbiruPhotoEditor
This one is a simple lightweight web-based photo editor written with PHP, JavaScript (jQuery), and using HTML5 Canvas.
It supports camera capture, image upload, and many image editing, transformation tools, effects, text editing, and more.
It is unclear if the developer abandoned, the project, as it did not update the repo since 2018.
kamshory15- Pie.js
pie.js is a layer-based image editor written with JavaScript and released as an open-source package under MIT License.
ange00716- Angular image editor
You may consider this one as an experimental package. It uses the Angular 9 framework primarily to build a simple image editor.
The user interface is quite simple, and it does not have many tools, effects, or filters like the other projects on this list.
pavlik111188Final thought
Image editors are an important asset, not just for designers, and photographers but also for daily users. Desktop image editors are fine, but they require desk space, and certain hardware specifications, and unlike desktop apps, web-based do not.
So, we hope our collection will be useful to those who want to have a self-hosted image editor on their machine or server.
If you know of any other open-source web-based image editor, let us know in the comments.
