PhotoCraft Photoshop-Compatible Photo Editor on GitHub
PhotoCraft is a clean-room photo editor written entirely in Rust that went from an empty repository on 30 September 2026 to the top of the GitHub trending boards in under two weeks — 53,904 stars, 8,997 forks, and a PSD engine the project measures against Photoshop file by file.
Why PhotoCraft is climbing the boards
The repository was created on 30 September 2026 and it already sits at 53,904 stars, 8,997 forks and 1,352 open issues, with 1,942 commits from 264 contributors. The latest push landed on 13 October 2026 and the newest release, v0.8.2, went out a day earlier with 26 downloadable assets.
Those numbers are unusual even for a viral repository: nine thousand forks means a large share of visitors cloned the project rather than just starring it, and the commit graph has not slowed down.
What is actually inside the repository
Twenty-five crates under crates/, all Rust, with no FFI into Adobe code and no borrowed sources — the project describes itself as a clean-room implementation. The pieces that matter most are photocraft-psd (a PSD reader and writer, not a wrapper around one), photocraft-gpu (a wgpu compositor for Metal, Vulkan, DX12 and WebGPU), a CPU compositor that acts as the reference oracle the GPU path is tested against, and the command layer that turns every menu action into a typed command.
There are 1,700 or more tests across the workspace, and the project keeps its own test corpora alongside the code.
The compatibility numbers behind the hype
PSD fidelity is the claim that made PhotoCraft famous, and the repository publishes the exact figures: 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools corpus render pixel-identical after a round trip, 169 of 170 in a mixed corpus, and 116 of 116 shape layers match Photoshop's own output. The PSD writer reproduces file bytes exactly for the corpus files it can parse.
Colour work is real rather than nominal: RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel, with ICC profiles applied throughout the pipeline.
Releases: what you can download today
Ten releases have shipped since the repository opened. v0.8.2 is the current one and its notes are thick with DPX codec support, agent-facing work on MCP and RPC, and a reworked CLI.
Prebuilt installers cover Windows x64, arm64 and x86 (signed MSI plus portable archives), macOS universal (signed and notarised disk image), Linux as AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm and tarball for x86_64 and aarch64, plus a riscv64 tarball, a FreeBSD 14 tarball and a WebAssembly build that runs the editor in a browser tab.
Build it from source
Any recent stable Rust toolchain is enough. Clone the repository, then cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd to open a document, or cargo test --workspace to run the test suite. The optional craft-fonts extra pulls in the Japanese fonts newer documents expect.
Where the project is honest about gaps
The README calls the project an early alpha and says plainly that it is not yet a daily replacement for a professional editing suite. Generative AI tools, roughly fifteen editor tools, deeper typography and the plug-in story are on the list. Drag and drop is still missing under Wayland.
Those gaps are worth reading before the star count: the interesting part of the repository is how much of the engine is already there, not the features that are not.
Who is behind it
PhotoCraft comes from the ArtCraft team, the group building a family of source-available creative apps: VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PdfCraft, EffectCraft and DesignCraft. The code is released under the MIT and Apache-2.0 licences, contributions run through the usual GitHub flow with a contributing guide and code of conduct, and the project keeps a public Discord.
Where to go next
Start with the repository and the releases page, then the project site for the wider Crafting Apps family. If you want the agent angle specifically, the MCP server and CLI are documented in the README next to the build instructions.
storytold/photocraft on GitHub · Releases · getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft