The future of PhotoDemon

Hello again! It’s been a few months since PhotoDemon 7.0 released, which means the latest nightly builds have a bunch of exciting new features. Examples include on-canvas rulers, support for 3rd-party palettes (Adobe PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Paint.Net), resizable tool panels, and selection tools that can be locked to a specific width, height, or aspect ratio.

PhotoDemon’s new canvas rulers

you can now customize the right-side panel layout to your liking

A new stable release is still a ways off, but you can download the latest nightly build to test-drive these new features. But today’s post is about more than just the latest and greatest PhotoDemon features. I actually have some big news…

…my wife and I are expecting.

Our new family member arrives this fall, and I couldn’t be more excited to meet him/her!

As you can imagine, this will have repercussions for PhotoDemon’s development schedule. Don’t worry - the program isn’t going anywhere! But with my time being squeezed (in new and exciting ways), I need to restructure to ensure I can still dedicate time to PhotoDemon.

Here’s my current plan.

First, photodemon.org is getting a major overhaul. In the coming weeks, this website will migrate to a new platform. (For web nerds out there, the new platform is Jekyll by way of GitHub Pages.) This new platform is much faster, more secure (https!), and it will require much less maintenance from me. Even better, it’s free for developers of open-source software, so I won’t have to pour PhotoDemon’s donations into a yearly pit of web hosting fees. Yay!

a sneak peek of the new, much faster photodemon.org - coming soon to a browser near you

As part of the migration, I have completely redesigned the site from the ground-up. The new design embraces the same crisp, modern aesthetic as PhotoDemon itself, and I’m very excited for a website that properly reflects the same attention to detail and usability as the program it represents.

Next, I have launched a Patreon campaign to fund ongoing PhotoDemon development. If you’re not familiar with Patreon, it is a modern take on the concept of patronage. Users can chip in as little as $1 a month to creators of free software (or art, music, etc). A reliable donation stream provides financial security for creators, and in the case of PhotoDemon, Patreon is an elegant way for me to “trade” work hours to this project.

Specifically, each donation represents a chunk of contracting work I can spend on PhotoDemon. This allows me to work on the program during daytime hours, instead of staying up into the wee hours of the night to study your bug reports, code new features, and read the many research papers that eventually become program tools and effects. (Those wee hours of the night will soon have competing family duties, as you can imagine.)

If even 0.1% of PhotoDemon’s users can chip in a few bucks a month, I could actually spend more time on PhotoDemon than I currently do. New releases could become a monthly event instead of a yearly one, and if we can reach $1000 in donations, I will finally buckle down and write a full user manual for the program. (This is currently my most-requested feature. I’ve been chipping away at it for months, but the time commitment it requires is enormous. Every donation helps!)

As a “thank you” to everyone who donates, I will be sharing monthly updates and new feature tutorials at PhotoDemon’s Patreon page. I’ve already written tutorials on the new features mentioned at the top of this page, and in fact the first one went live today - so consider joining me on Patreon to learn about all the exciting improvements coming to PhotoDemon 7.2.

That’s what’s new with me. I hope you’re doing well, too. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ll visit photodemon.org again in a few weeks when the new site goes live.

Thank you as well to everyone who has donated to the project already. PhotoDemon is now in its 6th year of being 100% free and 100% open-source, and it’s hard to believe that when it first released, it lacked basic features like selection tools, paint tools, text tools, and layer support. The past six years have seen unbelievable improvements, and it’s only been possible because so many kind souls have donated to the project.

I hope the next six years are just as exciting!

Kind regards,

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