PhotoCraft is an MIT/Apache-2.0 self-hostable Photoshop reimplementation with a headless CLI and an MCP server, so agents can run layer edits and batch jobs.
Yes, PhotoCraft is open source under the Apache-2.0 license.
PhotoCraft is free to use.
Yes, PhotoCraft can be self-hosted (the source is available under the Apache-2.0 license).
PhotoCraft is an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust, built from the start to be driven by agents as well as by a person. Every menu item, tool, and dialog runs a command from one registry of more than 500 commands, and the desktop GUI, a headless CLI, a JSON control channel, and an MCP server all call the same commands. Anything you can click, a script or an AI agent can do too. Open source: yes (dual MIT or Apache-2.0); self-hostable; free. It was published 2026-09-30 and, while it has drawn roughly 14.5k stars quickly, it is brand new and unproven in production.
PhotoCraft gives a lean content team layered image editing (filters, adjustment layers, curves, masks, exports) that runs on their own machine instead of behind an Adobe subscription, and makes that editing programmable. The CLI runs headless: photocraft-cli run wave.psd --cmd filter.sharpen.smartSharpen --params '{"amount":80}' --cmd layer.newAdjustmentLayer.curves --out wave-final.png, and photocraft-cli batch applies one action list to a whole folder of images. The MCP server (photocraft-cli mcp) lets an agent drive the application through the Model Context Protocol, either fully headless or bridged to a running app, and an authenticated loopback control channel exposes UI state, pointer-driven tooling, and offscreen screenshots. Because the UI, the CLI, the JSON channel, and the MCP server all dispatch the same 500-plus commands, a workflow an operator builds by hand is the same one an agent can repeat at scale.
Creative production is one of the places a lean GTM team still rents expensive, closed software and still does the work by hand. PhotoCraft's bet is that image editing can be both owned (a self-hosted, license-clean app) and automated (a CLI and an MCP server an agent can call), so the same agents that already run scraping, enrichment, or reporting can also produce and batch-edit ad creative and social graphics. The honest read: it is days old and unproven, it is a reimplementation chasing Photoshop rather than a settled product, and feature parity is a goal rather than a promise. But for a technical operator who wants agent-native creative tooling they own, the shared-command design (click it once, script it forever) is exactly the shape the rest of an owned, agent-driven stack already has.