WunderPaint – The Dynamic Design and Automation Studio

WunderPaint puts a complete, layer-based editor into your media library – and then removes the border between your designs and your content. Text and image layers don’t have to hold fixed values: point them at your posts, products, prices or custom fields, and the same design renders itself for any piece of content you preview it with. A blog header, a price badge, a product card – designed once, filled by your website. Around the editor, a full media manager keeps your growing library organized, and everything you make stays fully editable, with versions and rollback.

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A complete editor

Open any image, or start on a blank canvas, and work the way you would in a professional desktop editor:

• Layers, groups and masks with blend modes, non-destructive layer styles (drop shadow, glows, bevel, overlays, stroke and more), adjustment layers, clipping masks and Smart Objects.
• Selections that understand your image: marquee, lasso and magic wand, plus subject selection and click-to-select powered by local models. Refine, feather, invert, save and reuse selections.
• Painting and retouching: brush, pencil and eraser with opacity, flow and hardness, custom brush tips, clone stamp, blur/sharpen brush, symmetry painting and content-aware object removal.
• Vectors: pen tool with full path editing, shape library, gradients with on-canvas handles, dashed strokes, rounded and soft corners.
• Filters and effects from Gaussian Blur, Curves and Levels to Duotone, Halftone, Glitch, Glow and Tilt-Shift, plus color LUTs (.cube), filter presets, smart filters and one-click enhance.
• Precision tools: free transform with distortion, align and distribute, magnetic guides, radial repeat, guide templates, Magic Resize, and a recorder that captures your steps as replayable actions.
• Multi-page documents, tabs and safety nets: work on several documents at once, autosave to the browser every 30 seconds with session restore, and per-image version history with one-click rollback.
• Easy Mode keeps the surface calm and simple for occasional users; the full depth is one click away, on the very same document.

Design once – your content fills it in

This is the heart of WunderPaint. Text and image layers can be bound to live WordPress data instead of fixed values:

• Bind layers to your content: post title, excerpt, body, permalink, category, tags, dates, reading time and featured image; author name, bio and avatar; site name, tagline and logo; your own custom fields; ACF image and text fields.
• WooCommerce built in: product name, price, sale price, discount percentage, SKU, stock status and quantity, low-stock hint, rating, review count, sale end date and product image – fields that are empty outside a sale simply hide their layer, so “SALE” badges appear and disappear on their own.
• Mix text and variables: write {{post.title}} or {{product.price}} right inside a sentence. Bound text auto-fits its font size to the frame, bound images get cover/fit/fill rules with an anchor point.
• More than text and images: QR codes rebuild themselves from variables, charts and tables pull rows straight from a WordPress query, and Smart Objects containing bound layers re-render per post.
• Preview with real content while you design: pick any post or product, watch every binding resolve live on the canvas, then export or save the resolved result – and set it as the featured image in the same flow.
• Reviews, comments and people: pull approved reviews with stars, avatars and excerpts, or your site’s users as team cards, into designed layouts.
• Save as Dynamic Template and reopen it any time; the stored template keeps its placeholders, so one design serves your entire archive.

Real typography

Style single letters inside one layer, choose from one-click text styles and combinable text effects, bend text with warp presets or a free arc, run it along any path, flow it into a shape, or place an editable headline behind the subject of a photo. Area text wraps automatically, marker-style hand-drawn highlights decorate single passages, drag handles adjust tracking and leading directly on the canvas, and a WCAG contrast check warns you before your caption becomes unreadable. Fonts come from bundled families, from a catalog your server downloads and self-hosts, from your own uploaded font files, from fonts your site already provides – and from Google’s CDN only if you explicitly opt in.

Charts, tables and data

A dedicated studio builds chart types (bars, lines, areas, pie, ring, radar, waterfall, funnel, heatmap, treemap and more) and table types (comparison, pricing, ranking, schedule, checklist, menu, scorecard, calendar month, league table and more) – all as groups of real, editable shape and text layers, never flat images. Feed them by hand, paste CSV, or attach a WordPress query; cells and titles accept variables too.

Studios and generators built in

• Design Generator: describe what you need, get rendered layout variants with your brand colors, headline and logo, and insert the winner as editable layers – optionally already bound to post fields as a dynamic template. The image slot can use a stock photo, an AI image, or a placeholder.
• Background Studio: mesh gradients, organic blobs and waves, geometric lattices, low-poly, topographic contours, halftone rasters, concentric rings and confetti – all with grain and a random seed; tileable styles export as seamless patterns into your library.
• Screenshot Beautifier: frame any screenshot in a browser, phone or tablet mockup with shadow, radius and a generated background.
• Collage & Photo Grid: grids, mosaics, polaroids, filmstrips and contact sheets from your own photos – inserted as editable layers.
• Mockup Generator, QR codes with your logo (including a readability check), Vignette & Film looks, and stock photo search across Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay with your own free API keys.
• 360° panoramas: view a photo as a walkable sphere, smooth the seam, cover the floor with your logo, add linked hotspots, and copy a self-contained HTML embed for your visitors. With an AI provider configured, describe a place to generate the full sphere or extend an existing photo into one.

A media library that stays tidy

The built-in Media Library Manager can replace the standard media view and picker (opt-in):

• Real folders and tags as WordPress taxonomies, drag-and-drop organizing, bulk actions, saved searches and smart folders.
• Semantic search: find images by what they show, plus similar-image search, duplicate finder, color filters and folder suggestions – computed entirely in your browser against a locally hosted model.
• Know what you use: a usage analysis scans content, page-builder data, widgets, options and meta and answers “where is this image used?” with named sources and edit links. Find orphaned files, unused images and images missing alt text.
• Delete without fear: cleanup moves files into a holding area with a retention period and a daily release run instead of deleting instantly; restore anything with one click.
• Maintain at scale: replace an image and rewrite its references, recrop every thumbnail size with subject-aware auto-framing, spot oversized originals, keep IPTC credits and license info per image, rename titles by pattern, batch-watermark, and let the Metadata Assistant draft titles, alt texts and captions for the whole library (reviewed by you before anything is saved).
• See inside the file: a File data tab reads the camera, lens, software and location a photo carries, resolves coordinates to a place name on your own server, and removes either just the location or every embedded block, without re-encoding the picture.
• Optimized imports: bring files in through the manager and Smart Upload can scale them and convert them to WebP in your browser before they ever reach the server – no external service, no quota.

AI on your terms – or no AI at all

WunderPaint draws a hard line between two kinds of AI, and both are optional:

Local, no account, no key. These run in your browser against models hosted on your own server. Background removal works out of the box. Smart select, depth blur and depth fog, face blurring, image captions and alt text (with on-device translation), semantic image search and smarter text layouts each need a one-time model download (from a few dozen to a few hundred megabytes, depending on the model), fetched from Hugging Face only when an administrator requests it and served locally from then on. Alongside the models, purely algorithmic local tools need no download at all: upscaling, object removal, edge refinement, sticker and text-behind-subject cutouts, and the one-click looks Color Pop, Product Shot, Neon Rim, Speed Blur and Depth Fog.

Bring your own key. Connect Google Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic with your own API key. Gemini and OpenAI handle images: generate from text, edit a layer by instruction, inpaint inside a selection, outpaint beyond the canvas, create variants, turn sketches into finished images, generate vector illustrations and 360° panoramas, or replace a background. All three providers handle text tasks: design and layout suggestions, metadata generation, text improvement, and an in-editor help assistant. Keys stay on the server (or in wp-config.php), every service has a connection test, a monthly budget cap can stop spending, and a usage log shows estimated cost per day, provider and action. Without a key, no request ever leaves your site.

Private by design

Everything runs on your own server: no telemetry, no tracking, self-hosted fonts by default. Cloud AI only runs when you trigger it, with a key you own, and every service a feature can reach is listed under External Services below.

Grows with extensions

Studios that go beyond everyday editing come with the plugin and are simply there after installing: Chaos Art (a society of autonomous painters makes one-of-a-kind abstract art that can never be painted twice), Map Posters, Star Map Posters, Route Visualizer (a GPX track becomes a poster), Soundwave Art, Photo Mosaic, Text Art, Puzzle Sheets, Party Printables, Stitch Patterns, Drawing Templates, Origami, Day Ring, Papercut Art, Marble Bath, Mystic Studio, Seamless Patterns, Handwriting Fonts, Code Shot and Reformat (social formats with safe zones, in one pass). Each is a self-contained studio inside the editor, and new ones arrive with the next update.

WunderPaint Pro adds the extension manager – browse, install and update in one click – and the premium studios: 3D Mockup Studio with its library of product models, 3D Text, Motion Graphics, 3D Particle Studio, Cinematic Effects, Smart Diagrams, Calendars, Step Guides, Dynamic Showcases, Living Photos, Generative Art, AI Ad Banners and more. Extension packages are client-side only and can never ship server code.

Import, export and output

Import and export PSD including Smart Objects, edit SVGs as real vector layers, and export PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, multi-page PDF, animated GIF, APNG and WebM, favicon sets, carousel slices, and batches of multiple sizes as a ZIP. Exports can carry alt text, metadata, a watermark and an attached project file, so any saved image reopens later as a fully editable document. When you want to disclose AI involvement, the European Commission’s official labelling emblems are built in: pick one at save time and it goes into the picture where you place it, optionally alongside a matching entry in the file’s IPTC metadata. Nothing is ever labelled unless you ask for it.

WunderPaint Pro

The free editor is complete, and yours to use on as many sites as you like: every design tool, every binding, every local model above is free. WunderPaint Pro takes those same designs and runs them at scale, in the background and on your website: featured images generated across whole archives from one template (with per-category templates and generate-on-publish), WooCommerce catalog and product gallery graphics, image series from a CSV file, batch processing of your existing library (optimize, resize, watermark, apply recorded actions), dynamic images on the front end through blocks, shortcodes and native Elementor widgets that re-bake on a schedule, on shop events or via webhook, live badges, personalized per-visitor images, an AI content generator that drafts complete posts with matching graphics and SEO fields, multiple brand kits, one-click extension installs including all premium studios, and scheduled backups to S3-compatible storage.

Requirements

A current desktop browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari); the editor runs inside the WordPress admin and shows a notice on phones. Works with Gutenberg, Elementor, Bricks, Divi and any plugin that uses the media picker. The interface, the built-in handbook, the guided tours and the help assistant are available in English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch.

External Services

This plugin can talk to a number of external services, each only when you use the feature it belongs to, and a service that needs an API key stays silent until you enter that key. There is no analytics, no tracking and no telemetry of its own, and it never sends your content anywhere by itself.

The complete list, with the exact data each service receives and when, is in the FAQ below: “Which external services does this plugin use?” The same list, in more detail, is at https://help.wp-image-editor.com/#services

Bundled Libraries

WunderPaint is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later (see license.txt). Every bundled component is under a GPL-compatible license; full attributions are in third-party-licenses.txt.

The complete list, with the license of each component, is in the FAQ below: “Which third-party libraries are bundled?”

Development

The free plugin is open source (GPL-2.0-or-later). The human-readable source
of everything it ships – the editor bundle, the bundled studios and the
translations – is published at https://github.com/tbitdesign/WunderPaint.
BUILD.md there lists every generated file next to its source and the command
that produces it; the FAQ entry “Where is the source code of the compiled
files?” is the short version.