Free Online Image Editor

What Can You Do With the Image Editor?

The Pixab AI Image Editor is a professional-grade, browser-based photo editing application built on the miniPaint open-source project. It rivals many desktop apps in features while requiring zero installation and no account. Here is a breakdown of everything you can do:

Layers

Work non-destructively with a full layers system. Add new layers, delete unwanted ones, reorder them by dragging, merge layers together, or adjust each layer's opacity independently. Layers allow you to keep edits separate so you can tweak or discard any change without affecting the rest of your image.

Selection Tools

Make precise edits with rectangle selection, lasso (freehand) selection, and magic wand selection. The magic wand tool intelligently selects contiguous areas of similar colour with a single click, while the lasso lets you draw custom selection shapes around any irregular region.

Drawing Tools

Paint directly onto any layer with a brush, pencil, or eraser. Adjust brush size and opacity to blend or erase smoothly. The fill bucket tool floods a region with your chosen colour in one click, while the gradient tool lets you create smooth colour transitions across any area.

Shapes

Draw rectangles, circles, lines, and polygons. Choose fill colour, stroke colour, and stroke width. Shapes are rendered at full canvas resolution with crisp, anti-aliased edges.

Text Tool

Add text annotations, watermarks, or headlines to your image. Choose from any font available on your system, adjust size, colour, and style. Text is rendered as raster pixels on a layer, keeping the output universally compatible.

Filters and Effects

Apply a wide range of non-destructive filters from the Filter menu: blur (Gaussian), sharpen, brightness and contrast adjustments, hue/saturation shifts, grayscale conversion, sepia tone, vignette, pixelate, and emboss. Chain multiple filters together to achieve the exact look you want.

Transform

Rotate the canvas 90° clockwise or counter-clockwise, flip horizontally or vertically, and resize the canvas to any custom dimensions. All transforms apply to the entire document or to selected layers.

Crop, Clone Stamp & Color Picker

Crop your image to remove unwanted borders or focus on a subject. Use the clone stamp tool to sample one area and paint it over another — perfect for removing blemishes, scratches, or distracting objects. Pick any colour from the image itself using the colour picker to match existing tones exactly.

How to Use the Image Editor

1. 1

   Open the editor and load an image

   Click File → Open (or use Ctrl+O) to browse for an image on your computer. You can also drag and drop any image file directly onto the editor canvas. Supported formats include PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP, GIF, SVG, and AVIF.

2. 2

   Understand the interface

   The left sidebar contains your toolbox: selection tools, drawing tools, shapes, text, and utilities. The right panel shows your Layers list. The top menu bar gives access to File, Edit, Image, Filters, Layers, and View options.

3. 3

   Work with layers

   Open the Layer panel on the right. Click the + button to add a new layer above the current one. Drag layers to reorder them. Click the eye icon to hide/show a layer. Select a layer before painting or applying a filter to affect only that layer.

4. 4

   Use selection tools for precise edits

   Pick the Rectangle or Lasso selection tool from the left panel. Draw a selection around the area you want to edit. With an active selection, any paint, fill, or filter action applies only inside the selected region. Press Escape to deselect.

5. 5

   Apply filters from the Filter menu

   Click the Filter menu in the top bar. Choose any effect — blur, sharpen, brightness, contrast, hue/saturation, grayscale, sepia, vignette, pixelate, or emboss. A dialog will let you adjust the filter strength before applying.

6. 6

   Save your work

   Click File → Save As to export your edited image. Choose from PNG (lossless, supports transparency), JPG (smaller file, no transparency), WebP (best compression with quality), or BMP. Your file downloads directly to your computer — nothing is saved on any server.

Is This a Real Image Editor?

Yes — this is a fully functional image editor, not a stripped-down filter app. It is built on miniPaint, a mature open-source project that has been in active development for over a decade. It includes layers, selection tools, drawing tools, filters, text, shapes, transform operations, crop, clone stamp, and colour picker — the core toolkit that covers 95% of everyday image editing needs.

It is not as advanced as Photoshop or Affinity Photo. It does not support PSD native format, smart objects, vector layers, adjustment layers, or the non-destructive editing pipeline found in professional desktop applications. But for resizing, retouching, adding text or watermarks, applying filters, and compositing layered images, it works extremely well.

Compared to Photopea — the most popular browser-based Photoshop alternative — miniPaint is lighter and simpler. Photopea supports PSD import/export and advanced blending modes that miniPaint does not. However, miniPaint is completely open source, has no ads in the editor UI, and has no free-tier limitations. Both are free and run in the browser.

Why Use a Browser-Based Image Editor?

Browser-based image editors have become genuinely powerful. Modern browsers support WebAssembly, hardware-accelerated canvas rendering, and large off-screen memory — all of which make complex image manipulation feasible without a native app.

• No installation: Open your browser and start editing. Nothing to download, update, or maintain.
• Works on any OS: Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chromebook all work equally well. No platform-specific builds.
• No subscription: Completely free. No trial periods, no watermarks on exports, no account required.
• Private by design: Your files never leave your device. The editor runs entirely client-side. No image data is transmitted to any server.

Image Editor vs Other Tools on This Site

Pixab AI offers both a full image editor and a collection of dedicated single-operation tools. Here is how to choose the right one:

• Quick single operations: Use our dedicated tools. They are faster and simpler for one specific task. Remove Background for instant AI background removal. Image Resizer for exact dimension resizing. Image Compressor for shrinking file sizes. And Image to SVG for auto-tracing raster images to vector format.
• Complex multi-step editing: Use this full editor. When you need to combine multiple operations — for example: crop, then add a text overlay, then apply a blur to the background, then adjust brightness — the full editor is the right choice. You can do it all without downloading and re-uploading the image between tools.

Keyboard Shortcuts

miniPaint supports standard keyboard shortcuts to speed up your editing workflow:

Supported File Formats

Frequently Asked Questions