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30 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 Photocraft, Aseprite and PicGo. appsgit lists 30, including free alternatives to Adobe Lightroom, Aseprite and Adobe Photoshop, each with its platforms, license and install commands.

Updated Oct 28, 2026

Open Source Photo Editors (Photoshop Alternatives)

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What are the best open-source image and photo editors?

By GitHub stars, Photocraft is the most popular (74,094 stars), followed by Aseprite and PicGo. People often use these instead of Adobe Lightroom, Aseprite and Adobe Photoshop. Each page lists the platforms, license and last commit.

Which of these run on Windows, Mac and Linux?

28 of the 30 open-source image and photo editors listed here run on Windows, 25 on macOS and 26 on Linux; on a Mac, the most starred is Photocraft. 15 can be installed with a package manager such as Flathub, Homebrew, winget or Chocolatey.

Are these open-source image and photo editors free?

29 of the 30 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.