Feature request Photocraft Legacy Photoshop .8BF filter compatibility

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Feature request: Legacy Photoshop .8BF filter compatibility
Hello PhotoCraft team,
Congratulations on creating such a fast and promising Photoshop alternative! Very exited to find a "plug-in path" option in the filter drop down menu
I've been a Photoshop user for decades and have an extensive collection of legacy 32-bit Photoshop .8BF filters, many of which are no longer available.
Would you consider supporting these filters, perhaps through a compatibility bridge? Being able to revive them in PhotoCraft would be a tremendous advantage for longtime digital artists.
I'd be very interested to know whether this is on your development roadmap.
Thank you!
Vic

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[MalikAhed]

PhotoCraft’s current plug-in design cannot load legacy native Photoshop .8BF files by design: they require loading arbitrary native code, while PhotoCraft uses sandboxed WebAssembly plug-ins for safety and cross-platform support. The documented path is to port or wrap a filter as a .wasm plug-in and install it from Filter → Plug-ins: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/plugins.md. So an automatic .8BF compatibility bridge would be a major security/architecture change rather than a plug-in-folder setting. If that answers the compatibility question, please mark it as the answer.

[husseinm-dev]

Not on the PhotoCraft team, but I can share some useful context on this while you wait for an official answer.

The core problem with legacy .8BF filters is that most of them are 32-bit binaries, and modern 64-bit apps can't load 32-bit plugins directly into their process. That's why they stopped working in newer Photoshop versions too, it's not something a plug-in path setting alone can solve.

The good news is a compatibility bridge is absolutely doable. The proven approach is running the 32-bit filter in a separate 32-bit host process and passing the image data back and forth. Paint.NET's PSFilterPdn plugin does exactly this and it runs a huge chunk of the old 8BF catalog, so there's prior art the PhotoCraft devs could reference.

In the meantime, two workarounds to revive your collection today:

PSFilterPdn with Paint.NET (Windows, free). Hosts 32-bit 8BF filters inside a 64-bit app. You can run the filter there, save, and continue in PhotoCraft.
GIMP with the pspi plugin also runs many classic 8BF filters.
Not as smooth as native support, but it keeps those filters usable until something like this lands on the roadmap. Worth upvoting this request so the team can gauge demand.

[puntajesisben]

Thanks for breaking down the technical side! It makes total sense why native .8BF support is tricky due to security and WebAssembly sandboxing, but using a separate host process like PSFilterPdn seems like a really solid workaround.

Supporting legacy filters would definitely be a huge selling point for users transitioning from Photoshop. Hopefully, the dev team considers something like this down the road!

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