A site about free image editors should act like a free image editor: honest about its limits, loud about its choices, and useful before it is pretty. So here are the eight things we will not bend on.
If the export button is gated, the watermark is sticky, or the second project costs money, it is not free. It is a demo with a countdown. Tools like GIMP ship the whole program with nothing held back. That is the bar. Everything else gets a clear label, not a soft one.
Reviews here come from sitting in front of a real file with a real deadline. We resize, we crop, we layer, we undo, we save, we reopen, we curse. Whatever runs in a browser gets tested in three browsers. Whatever installs gets installed. No press kits, no screenshots from the vendor.
A web artist drawing with a pen tablet does not want the same program as a marketer batch-resizing 200 product shots. Painters need brushes that feel alive — that is why projects like Krita exist and why comparing them to a quick-crop web app misses the point. We sort by task, not by star count.
A one-click background remover is wonderful until it eats a strand of hair you needed. Generative fill is brilliant until it invents a sixth finger. We say which jobs the auto-tools actually finish and which jobs still need a person and a brush. The hype goes on the cutting-room floor.
Most of what makes the free side of this market worth caring about is built by volunteers and small teams donating their weekends. When a tool like Inkscape holds up against a paid competitor, we say so plainly and we link the project, not an affiliate funnel.
If an editor is great, the first paragraph says so. If it is not, the first paragraph says that too. Reviews here open with the call, then explain it. Nobody should have to scroll past twelve screens of SEO filler to learn whether a browser editor is worth the tab.
Free software ships fast. A tool that was clunky in spring may be excellent by autumn. When that happens we rewrite the page, date the change, and say what moved. No silent edits, no quietly bumped rankings. The history of our opinion stays visible.
If you find a mistake, if a link rotted, if an editor we ignored has gotten good — tell us. The about page has the address and the names of the people behind it. There is no contact form that routes to a black hole. A real human reads it.
— The editors, on the record.