miniPaint

What miniPaint does

miniPaint is an image editor that runs entirely in a web browser. You start from a blank canvas, paste an image from the clipboard, drag in files or open a URL, and work with a set of tools that will be familiar from desktop editors: pencil, brush, eraser, fill and gradient, magic wand, clone, blur and sharpen brushes, text, crop and a content-fill tool. Images can be resized with Hermite resampling, rotated, flipped and trimmed, and the image menu shows EXIF data and a histogram alongside brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and automatic color adjustment.

Version 4 rebuilt the engine around layers held in memory, so moving, scaling or rotating an object no longer degrades it each time. Since then the editor has also gained editable shapes (rectangles, ellipses, arrows, polygons, Bezier curves, stars, callouts and more) whose color and size can be changed after they are drawn. The effects menu is large: several kinds of blur, denoise, dithering, emboss, oil, tilt shift, vignette, sepia and a group of Instagram-style filters.

Work can be saved as PNG, JPG, BMP, WEBP, TIFF or animated GIF, or as a JSON file that preserves the layers so you can continue editing later.

Privacy

The README states that nothing you open is sent to a server: images stay in the browser. Two optional features do contact outside services. Searching for stock images uses the Pixabay API and only works when an API key is set in the configuration, and the text tool loads fonts from Google Fonts. If you host your own copy, you decide whether those are enabled.

Self-hosting miniPaint

Because all processing happens on the client, self-hosting means serving static files. The wiki’s build instructions use Git and npm: install the dependencies, run npm run build, and put the result on any web server. There is no database, backend or account system to maintain. The project does not publish an official container image, but the wiki collects several Dockerfiles contributed by users, based on Node or nginx.

miniPaint can also be embedded in another page with an iframe, and the host page can reach its layers class from JavaScript. The wiki explains how to add new menu modules and tools, which makes it a reasonable base for an image editor inside a larger web application.

Hosted version

The developer runs the editor on GitHub Pages at viliusle.github.io/miniPaint. It needs no account and shows no ads, and there is no paid plan; it is the same code as the repository.

Limitations

miniPaint is maintained by one developer and releases are infrequent: version 4.14.2 came out in March 2024 and 4.14.3 in April 2026, the latter mostly library and translation updates. Documentation is limited to the README and a handful of wiki pages. It is a raster editor for quick edits and simple graphics: there are no templates, brand kits, design components or real-time collaboration, so it does not replace Canva or Figma, and it is not built for professional photo work such as RAW development.

Who it suits

miniPaint suits people who want to crop, annotate, combine or filter images on any computer without installing software, and developers who need an embeddable editor that keeps files on the user’s device. For a desktop editor with a similar scope, see Pinta; for painting with a tablet, MyPaint or Drawpile; for vector work in the browser, SVGEdit and Graphite.