28 open-source image and photo editors
Open Source Photo Editors (Photoshop Alternatives)
The most popular open-source image and photo editors for Windows, macOS and Linux on GitHub are Aseprite, PicGo and Photocraft. appsgit lists 28, including free alternatives to Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop and Aseprite, each with its platforms, license and install commands.
Updated Oct 8, 2026
Open Source Photo Editors (Photoshop Alternatives)
Aseprite
aseprite/aseprite
Animated sprite editor & pixel art tool (Windows, macOS, Linux).
OfficialImage editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPicGo
Molunerfinn/PicGo
The Ultimate Image Uploader for Efficient Creators.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPhotocraft
storytold/photocraft
An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPhotoGIMP
Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
A Patch for GIMP 3+ for Photoshop Users.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxdarktable
darktable-org/darktable
darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer.
OfficialImage editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxKrita
KDE/krita
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.
OfficialImage editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPixelorama
Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama
Unleash your creativity with Pixelorama, a powerful and accessible open-source pixel art multitool.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxRapidRAW
CyberTimon/RapidRAW
A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxLibreSprite
LibreSprite/LibreSprite
Animated sprite editor & pixel art tool -- Fork of the last GPLv2 commit of Aseprite.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPixiEditor
PixiEditor/PixiEditor
PixiEditor is a Universal Editor for all your 2D needs.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxJspaint
1j01/jspaint
Classic MS Paint, ＲＥＶＩＶＥＤ + Extras.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxGIMP
GNOME/gimp
GIMP is a cross-platform image editor for photo retouching, image composition and digital painting.
OfficialImage editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxRawTherapee
RawTherapee/RawTherapee
A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxPinta
PintaProject/Pinta
Pinta is a GTK clone of Paint.Net 3.0, with support for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
OfficialImage editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxLap
julyx10/lap
An offline-first photo manager for large local libraries.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxNomacs
nomacs/nomacs
nomacs is a free image viewer for windows, linux, and mac systems.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxMypaint
mypaint/mypaint
MyPaint is a simple drawing and painting program that works well with Wacom-style graphics tablets.
Image editing & photoWindowsLinuxREAL Video Enhancer
TNTwise/REAL-Video-Enhancer
Interpolate, Upscale, Decompress, and Denoise videos easily on Linux/Windows/MacOS.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxOculante
woelper/oculante
A fast and simple image viewer / editor for many operating systems.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxRealesrgan Gui
TransparentLC/realesrgan-gui
实用、美观的 Real-ESRGAN 图形界面，同时支持 Windows、Ubuntu 和 macOS 平台。现在也支持 Real-CUGAN 了！(Cross-platform GUI for image upscaler Real-ESRGAN with additional features.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSTev
Tom94/tev
High dynamic range (HDR) image viewer for people who care about colors.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxMulimgViewer
nachifur/MulimgViewer
MulimgViewer is a multi-image viewer that can open multiple images in one interface, which is convenient for image comparison and image stitching.
Image editing & photoWindowsLinuxFlowVision
netdcy/FlowVision
Waterfall-style image viewer for macOS, offering a smooth and immersive browsing experience.
Image editing & photomacOSJarkViewer
jark006/JarkViewer
一款简约且飞快的看图软件，支持 AVIF、HEIC、JPEG-XL 和 实况照片 等超多新兴图像格式！A minimalist and lightning-fast image viewer that supports a wide range of emerging image formats such as AVIF, HEIC, JPEG-XL, and Live Photos!
Image editing & photoWindowsSlate
mitchcurtis/slate
Slate is a bitmap editor available for Linux, Windows and Mac.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxNeeView
neelabo/NeeView
An image viewer that allows you to browse images in folders and compressed files like a book.
Image editing & photoWindowsRclip
yurijmikhalevich/rclip
grep for images – local, offline image search for the terminal.
Image editing & photoWindowsmacOSLinuxGeeqie
BestImageViewer/geeqie
claiming to be the best image viewer / photo collection browser.
Image editing & photoLinux
What are the best open-source image and photo editors?
By GitHub stars, Aseprite is the most popular (39,940 stars), followed by PicGo and Photocraft. People often use these instead of Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop and Aseprite. Each page lists the platforms, license and last commit.
Which of these run on Windows, Mac and Linux?
26 of the 28 open-source image and photo editors listed here run on Windows, 23 on macOS and 24 on Linux; on a Mac, the most starred is Aseprite. 13 can be installed with a package manager such as Flathub, Homebrew, winget or Chocolatey.
Are these open-source image and photo editors free?
27 of the 28 use an open-source license, so they are free to use and change. 1 is source-available (Aseprite): the code is public but the license restricts some uses.
How are these open-source image and photo editors chosen?
Apps come from desktop awesome lists (Awesome Linux Software, awesome-mac, awesome-windows, awesome-electron and the media and file sections of awesome-cli-apps), more than 70 GitHub topics such as desktop-app, electron-app, tauri-app, gtk, qt, macos-app, pdf-editor, cad and remote-desktop, and a hand-picked list of flagship apps. An app is listed only if it has a license (one GitHub detects, or one appsgit checked by hand), a README and a commit in the last six months, is not archived or a fork, and has 1000+ GitHub stars (topics), 500+ (awesome lists) or 100+ (hand-picked). It must also be an end-user application with a desktop signal: installers in its releases, install instructions for Windows, macOS or Linux, or a Flathub, Homebrew, winget, Chocolatey, Snap or AUR package. Libraries, frameworks, themes, plugins and servers are left out, and source-available apps are labelled as such.