PhotoCraft, an open-source Photoshop alternative, passed 46,278 stars in 12 days

The one reason most design teams still pay for Adobe Photoshop is that few other editors can open a layered PSD and write it back out intact. A new open-source project called PhotoCraft, written in pure Rust, now reports it does so for 307 of the 309 files in the public psd-tools test corpus, and it reached 46,278 stars on GitHub in the 12 days since its first public commit.

The repository storytold/photocraft is 12 days old, is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, and has published seven releases in those 12 days, by its own release list. The GitHub organisation storytold, which names itself ArtCraft on its own site, holds 57 public repositories and existed before the Craft family began.

The family covers twelve creative tools

PhotoCraft is the lead app in a 12-app family called ArtCraft. The ArtCraft page at getartcraft.com/apps names the full set: image editing (PhotoCraft), vector illustration (VectorCraft), video editing (FilmCraft), a photo library and raw developer (LightCraft), a PDF workbench (PdfCraft), motion graphics (EffectCraft), page layout (DesignCraft), word processing (WordCraft), audio (SoundCraft), presentations (DeckCraft), computer-aided design (CADCraft) and spreadsheets (GridCraft).

Five of those apps are only four days old as public repositories: WordCraft, GridCraft, CADCraft, DeckCraft and SoundCraft. Together they add 13,564 stars across those four days, by GitHub's own count. The 12 app repositories together total 103,401 stars. Only PhotoCraft and PdfCraft are marked "Early alpha" with installers for macOS, Windows and Linux; the other 10 are listed on the site as in development.

What makes PhotoCraft a real test

The PSD support is a standalone crate written from Adobe's public specification. The repository's README states that opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in a mixed ag-psd and psd-tools set. Only the standalone photocraft-psd crate, parsing and writing without the document model, reproduces every parseable file byte for byte.

The canvas renders natively on Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12 and WebGPU rather than through Electron, and the whole engine and UI compile to WebAssembly as well. The project reports more than 1,700 tests, 500 commands in one registry, and support for 8-, 16- and 32-bit documents in RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab with ICC colour management in pure Rust.

Every tool, menu item and dialog is one of those 500 commands, and the project provides a CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server that all drive the same engine. That makes PhotoCraft one of the first mainstream creative apps built as a tool an AI coding agent can call, which matters as agents move from code into image and video work.

The alpha label is honest. Features are still missing, two PSD files out of 309 still differ, and ten of the 12 apps have no installer. Before any switch, the number to run on a team's own library is how many of its PSDs open and resave cleanly in PhotoCraft, because that is the cost that keeps most of them on Adobe today.

Source

Primary: storytold/photocraft on GitHub, with the ArtCraft apps page and the v0.7.0 release. Discussion: Show HN thread, 59 points, 62 comments.