Photopea creator accuses open-source Photosuite of copying his browser photo editor

The developer behind Photopea has publicly accused another project of copying his work. In an issue filed on the Photosuite repository at GitHub, he tells the maintainers they should do original work rather than reproduce an editor he says he has been building since 2012, and questions why the platform hosts what he considers piracy.

The accusation

According to the issue on the eolix/photosuite repository, Photopea's creator, Ivan Kutskir, wrote that he would prefer the team to do real work of their own instead of lifting material from photopea.com, the application he has maintained for well over a decade. He asks whether they could implement a photo editor from scratch rather than take his, and adds that he is surprised GitHub tolerates what he describes as piracy on its platform.

The complaint drew wider attention after the issue reached the front page of Hacker News, according to the site's front-page feed dated 4 October 2026, which is how the dispute surfaced beyond the project's own tracker.

A grievance filed through a bug template

The accusation arrived through the repository's standard bug-report form, which gives the message an unusual shape. The substance of the complaint sits under a heading that asks what feature is missing, while adjacent sections asking where the problem lives in Photoshop and how the software should behave were left unanswered.

A final section of the template deals with whether the reported issue affects saved files, including whether changes round-trip correctly with Photoshop's PSD format. That framing, and the template's Photoshop references, indicate Photosuite positions itself as a Photoshop-compatible editor that reads and writes PSD files, the same territory Photopea has occupied for years.

Notably, the issue itself contains no specifics about what was allegedly copied. It does not point to particular source files, interface elements, assets or commits, and it does not distinguish between lifted code and imitated design. On the evidence available, the claim rests on the creator's assertion rather than a documented comparison.

Why browser apps are easy to imitate

Photopea is a free image editor that runs entirely in the browser and is widely used as a Photoshop alternative, with support for opening and saving PSD files. Its creator says he has worked on it alone since 2012, which makes it one of the longest-running solo projects in the web-tools space.

That context matters because anything delivered to a browser — the JavaScript, markup and styling that make up an editor like Photopea — is shipped to every visitor by design. Inspecting and reproducing a web application is technically trivial in a way that copying desktop software is not, while the legal ground is murkier: user interfaces and functionality tend to receive weaker protection than literal code, and enforcement generally depends on rights holders filing formal takedown requests rather than on platforms acting on their own initiative.

Why it matters

The episode highlights the unresolved line between inspiration and copying in open-source clones of successful commercial web apps. Communities have long tolerated, and often celebrated, projects that replicate the look and behaviour of proprietary tools, but disputes like this one show how that norm collides with the economics of small, independent developers whose entire product is the web app itself.

It also underlines how platform moderation actually works. A public accusation on a repository does not, by itself, trigger any review or removal; the formal route for a developer who believes code has been copied is a copyright takedown notice, and GitHub acts on those rather than on issue-thread complaints.

Finally, the story is a reminder of how quickly such disputes can escalate once they reach an aggregator like Hacker News, putting both the accusation and the accused project in front of a large technical audience. What happens next — whether the Photosuite maintainers respond, contest the claim, remove contested material, or whether a formal takedown follows — is not recorded in the source material, so the outcome remains open.