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PhotoCraft: a free open-source Photoshop rebuild in Rust
PhotoCraft is a free, open-source photo editor rebuilt from scratch in Rust, with no Photoshop code inside. It runs entirely on your own computer, no cloud or account needed.
It's a free, open-source photo editor — a clean-room rebuild of Photoshop with none of the original code inside. Each of the program's 500+ actions can be run from the command line or handed to an AI agent instead of clicking. One such command applies the same edit to an entire folder of photos at once.
When it helps
Useful for simple, repeatable edits: batch color correction, cropping, or exporting a stack of photos. It's too early for serious professional retouching — the makers themselves say it's missing generative AI tools, around twenty familiar Photoshop tools, and depth in typography.
Pros
- Free and open source — no subscription, no account
- All processing runs locally, no cloud needed
- One command applies an edit to a whole folder of photos
- Same shortcuts and layout as Photoshop — no relearning needed
Cons
- No generative AI editing tools yet
- Missing around twenty tools familiar from Photoshop
- Typography lacks the depth of the original
How to set it up — step by step
- 1Open your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex) in your project folder
- 2Send the agent the text from the block below
- 3Wait while the agent installs PhotoCraft and runs photocraft-cli on test photos
- 4Check the result — a matching edit on the test photos and the command the agent used
- 5If the edit works, ask the agent to apply it to your whole photo folder
Text for your agent
Copy this and send it to your agent — Claude Code, Codex, any of them:
Set up PhotoCraft from https://github.com/storytold/photocraft — build it from source or grab a release per the README, run a couple of test photos through photocraft-cli with the same edit (say, a Curves adjustment exported to PNG), and show me the result and the command you used.
A regular laptop — no dedicated graphics card needed, integrated graphics are enough. No cloud or account either: the authors say all processing runs on your own machine.
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