Eighteen years ago I started working on Photofiltre LX, a Linux port of the classic Windows image editor Photofiltre. I didn’t set out to build something of my own. I just wanted a tool that worked on Linux and decided to make it myself.
Over time something shifted. The work became less about porting and more about vision. I had ideas that didn’t fit within someone else’s project. So I rewrote everything from scratch and gave it a new name – Photoflare. My own identity, my own direction, my own responsibility.
That decision turned out to be the right one. Photoflare found its own community. It was translated into fifteen languages by volunteers I’ve never met in person. It was packaged by Linux distributions I didn’t submit to. It was downloaded by people whose names I’ll never know, on computers I’ll never see, in countries I’ve never visited.
That has always felt remarkable to me. It still does.
I want to be honest with you about something I’ve never said publicly before.
Donations over eighteen years have been poor. Not disappointing, just genuinely poor. The kind of poor that means Photoflare has existed entirely on personal time, personal hardware, and the stubborn belief that it was worth continuing. There was never a team. There was never funding. There was just the work.
I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty. Most of you never even had the opportunity to donate. You found the software, it worked, you used it. That’s exactly what free software is supposed to do. But it means that Photoflare has reached a point where continuing the way things have been isn’t sustainable.
The good news is that I’ve spent the past few years working on something significant. A complete architectural rewrite. Cross platform. Modern. Built with the next decade in mind.
I’m not ready to share everything yet. However, I wanted you to hear it from me first, honestly, before anything else is announced.
Photoflare isn’t going anywhere. The open source version you know remains exactly what it has always been – free, open, yours. What’s coming is built around it, not instead of it.
More soon.
Dylan
If you have questions, the best place to reach me is the contact page. I read everything!