PhotoEditor is an open-source Kotlin library for Android that adds paint, text, filter, emoji, and sticker editing directly inside an app's own image workflow, and it is aimed at Android developers who need story-style or social editing features without building that stack themselves.

What it is

PhotoEditor is an Android library distributed as com.burhanrashid52:photoeditor, with the current release at version 3.1.1 and a minimum supported API level of 21. It is written in Kotlin, released under the MIT licence, and published to mavenCentral(). The project lives in the Android ecosystem as a view-level editing component: an application places PhotoEditorView in its XML layout, supplies an image through app:photo_src or programmatically through mPhotoEditorView.source, and then builds a PhotoEditor instance from a Context and that view.

The concrete problem it solves is the editing layer itself. Without it, an Android developer has to write drawing, gesture handling, undo and redo history, text overlays, filter application, and sticker placement by hand on top of Canvas and ImageView, then keep all of it consistent across rotation, scaling, and deletion. PhotoEditor replaces that hand-rolled editing stack with a documented set of components, so the host application only has to load the source image, present the editor, and store the saved result.

Key capabilities

• Drawing on the image with configurable brush color, size, opacity, erasing, and basic shapes.
• Filter effects applied to the image through MediaEffect.
• Adding and editing text with configurable color and custom fonts.
• Adding emoji, including support for custom emoji fonts.
• Adding images and stickers, with pinch-to-scale and rotate gestures on placed views.
• Undo and redo history covering both brush strokes and placed views, plus deletion of individual views.
• Saving the edited photo once work is complete, and declaring the source drawable or color through the app:photo_src attribute.

Who uses it and how

• Android app teams that need an in-app editor for social or story-style posts, which is the use case the README and topics such as instagram, facebook, and stories point to.
• Developers building chat, messaging, or profile-photo flows who want annotation and sticker tools without writing their own gesture and history handling.
• Applications on AndroidX, which is the baseline from version 1.0.0 onward; projects still on the old support library can roll back to version 0.4.0.
• Java codebases, which can use the 1.5.1 release, since the library migrated fully to Kotlin at version 2.0.0 with no breaking API changes between those versions.
• Teams that need deep customisation, who can import the :photoeditor module from the sample project rather than consuming the published artifact.

Getting started

Add the dependency to the app module's Gradle file from mavenCentral(): implementation 'com.burhanrashid52:photoeditor:3.1.1', then declare PhotoEditorView in the layout and build a PhotoEditor from a Context and that view. The :photoeditor module can also be imported from the sample project when further customisation is required.

How it compares

This registry entry names no paid products that PhotoEditor replaces, and it also names no sibling libraries, so on the facts available it stands alone here. Its practical alternative is not another packaged editor but writing the equivalent drawing, filtering, overlay, and undo-and-redo code from scratch on Android's Canvas and ImageView.

When to use it — and when not to

There is no database, object storage, or SMTP service to operate, because PhotoEditor is a client-side Android library rather than a hosted product; the host app remains responsible for image loading through libraries such as Picasso or Glide, for file storage, and for persisting the saved output. It is the wrong choice for iOS, Flutter, React Native, or any non-Android target, and for projects that only need a static crop or resize, where a lighter dependency is enough. The project carries 57 open issues and its README delegates substantial detail to a FAQ section and linked images, so adopters should expect to read the sample project and issue tracker rather than relying on the README alone.

implementation 'com.burhanrashid52:photoeditor:3.1.1'

 <ja.burhanrashid52.photoeditor.PhotoEditorView
        android:id="@+id/photoEditorView"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent"
        app:photo_src="@drawable/got_s" />
  

mPhotoEditorView = findViewById(R.id.photoEditorView)

mPhotoEditorView.source.setImageResource(R.drawable.paris_tower)

//Use custom font using latest support library
val mTextRobotoTf = ResourcesCompat.getFont(this, R.font.roboto_medium)
//loading font from asset
val mEmojiTypeFace = Typeface.createFromAsset(getAssets(), "emojione-android.ttf")

mPhotoEditor = PhotoEditor.Builder(this, mPhotoEditorView)
            .setPinchTextScalable(pinchTextScalable) // set flag to make text scalable when pinch
            .setDefaultTextTypeface(mTextRobotoTf)
            .setDefaultEmojiTypeface(mEmojiTypeFace)
            .build() // build photo editor sdk

val shapeBuilder = ShapeBuilder()
    .withShapeOpacity(100)
    .withShapeType(ShapeType.Oval)
    .withShapeSize(50f)

photoEditor.setShape(mShapeBuilder)

photoEditor.addText(
    text = inputText,
    colorCodeTextView = colorCode
)

photoEditor.addText(
    text = inputText,
    textTypeface = mTypeface,
    colorCodeTextView = colorCode
)

photoEditor.addText(
    text = inputText,
    position = Position(80, 160),
    colorCodeTextView = colorCode
)