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A free portable photo editor focused on pro-grade features, high performance, and maximum usability.

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About PhotoDemon

PhotoDemon is a portable photo editor. It is 100% free and 100% open-source.

  1. Overview
  2. What makes PhotoDemon unique?
  3. What's new in nightly builds
  4. Contributing
  5. Licensing

Overview

Screenshot

PhotoDemon provides a comprehensive photo editor in a 15 MB download. It runs on any Windows PC (XP through Win 11) and it does not require installation. You can run it from a USB stick, SD card, or portable drive.

PhotoDemon is open-source and available under a permissive BSD license. Contributors have translated the program into more than a dozen languages.

You can support PhotoDemon's ongoing development through Patreon or with a one-time donation.

New contributions from translators, coders, designers, and enthusiasts are always welcome.

What makes PhotoDemon unique?

Lightweight and completely portable

No installer is provided or required. Aside from a temporary folder – which you can specify in the Tools > Options menu – PhotoDemon leaves no trace on your hard drive. Many users run PhotoDemon from a USB stick or microSD card.

Integrated macro recording and batch processing

Complex editing actions can be recorded as macros (similar to Office software). A built-in batch processor lets you apply macros to entire folders of images.

Usability is paramount

Many open-source photo editors are usability nightmares. PhotoDemon tries not to be. Small touches like real-time effect previews, save/load presets on all tools, unlimited Undo/Redo, "Fade last action", keyboard accelerators, mouse wheel and X-button support, and descriptive icons make it fast and easy to use.

Pro-grade features and tools

  • Extensive file format support, including Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Corel PaintShop Pro (PSP), GIMP (XCF), and all major camera RAW formats
  • Advanced multi-layer support, including editable text layers and non-destructive layer modifications
  • Color-managed workflow, including full support for embedded ICC profiles
  • On-canvas tools: digital paintbrushes, clone and pattern brushes, advanced selection tools, interactive gradients, and more
  • Adjustment tools: levels, curves, HDR, shadow/highlight recovery, white balance, and many more
  • Filters and effects: perspective correction, edge enhancement, noise removal, content-aware fill and resize, unsharp masking, gradient and palette mapping, and many more
  • More than 200 tools are provided in the current build.

Limitations

  • PhotoDemon isn't designed for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. A compatibility layer like Wine may allow it to work on macOS, Linux, or BSD systems, but these configurations are not officially supported.
  • Due to its portable nature, PhotoDemon is only available as a 32-bit application. (This means it cannot load or save images larger than ~2 GB in size.)

What's new in nightly builds

GitHub last commit GitHub commits since latest release

Current nightly builds offer the following improvements over the last stable release.

File formats

  • HEIF/HEIC images can now be imported into PhotoDemon (via libheif). Multi-frame HEIF images are also supported.

Other

For a full list of changes, visit the project's commit log.

Contributing

Ongoing PhotoDemon development is made possible by donations from users.

My Patreon campaign is one way to donate. I am also extremely grateful for one-time donations. A secure donation page is available at photodemon.org/donate. Thank you!

If you can contribute in other ways (language translations, bug reports, pull requests, etc), please create a new issue at GitHub. A full list of (wonderful!) contributors is available in AUTHORS.md.

Licensing

PhotoDemon is BSD-licensed. This allows you to use its source code in any application, commercial or otherwise, if you supply proper attribution. Proper attribution includes a notice of copyright and disclaimer of warranty.

PhotoDemon uses some 3rd-party libraries. These libraries are found in the /App/PhotoDemon/Plugins folder. These libraries have their own licenses, separate from PhotoDemon.

Full licensing details are available in LICENSE.md.