Edit a PSD on a Chromebook or Linux without Photoshop

Updated October 14, 2026. Written for PhotoCraft 0.8.2 (what changed since). Prices in USD.

Your options

Photoshop on the web is a real option on a Chromebook if you already pay for Photoshop: Adobe lists ChromeOS 102 and later, with 8 GB of RAM and a 2015 or newer device. There is no free version of it, though. Photopea is the long-established free browser editor and is compared in detail in PhotoCraft vs Photopea. GIMP 3.2 opens and exports PSD files, in an interface of its own, and its documentation doesn't promise that Photoshop adjustment layers or smart objects stay editable.

On a Chromebook

1. Open Chrome and go to photocraft.run/editor. The first visit downloads the app, a WebAssembly file of about 25 MB before compression. Later visits load it from the browser cache.
2. Open the PSD. Drag it from the Files app onto the canvas, or use File › Open. The file is read inside the browser tab; nothing is uploaded.
3. Edit as you would in Photoshop. The menus, panels and shortcuts follow Photoshop's layout. Double-click a type layer to change the words, toggle adjustment layers, move and transform layers.
4. Save. File › Save As… downloads a PSD that opens in Photoshop. For a flat image, File › Export › Export As… writes PNG, JPEG or WebP. Both go wherever Chrome saves downloads, usually the Downloads folder.

Graphics: PhotoCraft draws the canvas with WebGPU when the browser offers it and falls back to WebGL2 when it doesn't. Chrome turned on WebGPU for ChromeOS in version 113, on Chromebooks with Vulkan support. Chromebooks without it use the WebGL2 path, which works but is slower.

With a big PSB or a document with hundreds of layers, the Chromebook's RAM sets the ceiling: how big a file you can open depends on memory and on Chrome, and a tab holding a large layered file competes with every other tab. Close the rest before you open it.

Touch-only use is cramped. The editor is built for a mouse or trackpad and a large screen, and on a small screen it says so before you start. A Chromebook in laptop mode is fine; a detached tablet is not where you want to retouch a PSD.

Why not install a Linux app on the Chromebook?

ChromeOS can run Linux apps in its Linux development environment (Settings › About ChromeOS › Developers), a Debian container where PhotoCraft's .deb or GIMP would install. Two things count against it for image editing. Google states that Linux apps on ChromeOS get no hardware acceleration, GPU included, while Chrome itself uses the GPU. And on school and work Chromebooks the administrator can turn the Linux environment off. That leaves the browser editor as the route that keeps GPU drawing and works on a managed Chromebook.

On Linux

The browser route is the same as above, in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox or Edge. If your browser doesn't expose WebGPU, PhotoCraft runs on WebGL2 without any setting from you.

For regular work, install the desktop build. Every PhotoCraft release has Linux packages for x86_64 and ARM64:

• AppImage: no install, make it executable and run it.
• .deb for Debian and Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora, RHEL and openSUSE.
• Flatpak bundle, sandboxed; it needs the freedesktop runtime from Flathub, which flatpak offers to install with it.
• Tarball to unpack anywhere. RISC-V gets a tarball too (glibc 2.39 or newer).

The desktop build earns its download in three places: it uses the fonts installed on your system, it has autosave and crash recovery, and it is more comfortable with very large documents. It also has MCP and a command-line tool for scripted edits.

One Linux-specific catch: on a Wayland session, files dragged onto the desktop app's window don't open yet, because the windowing library under it has no Wayland drag and drop. Use File › Open, or copy the file in your file manager and paste it with Ctrl+V. If you want drag and drop, start the app under XWayland with WAYLAND_DISPLAY= photocraft (for the AppImage, WAYLAND_DISPLAY= ./photocraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage). The browser editor doesn't have this problem.

Before a long edit

The browser version keeps no autosave and no crash recovery. If the tab reloads, unsaved work is gone, so press File › Save every so often; each save downloads a fresh copy.

Fonts are the other surprise. A browser can't read the fonts on your computer, so a PSD set in a commercial typeface opens with a substitute. On photocraft.run the font menu has 39 open-license families, including Roboto, Montserrat, Open Sans and Noto Sans for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. If the exact font matters, either use the Linux desktop build with the font installed, or leave those type layers alone and edit the rest.

The hub guide online vs desktop lists what changes between the two builds for every Craft app, PhotoCraft included.