A free, open-source photo and video editor for Android.
Cut-outs, captions, stickers, effects, transitions, video over video, voiceover, music and a real layer timeline. No account, no subscription, no watermark, no ads.

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Kadar (KAH-dar) is Bosnian for a frame or a shot in film. The app started because a meme page needed the everyday editing tools, removing a background, slapping a caption on, speeding up a clip, adding music, without paying a monthly fee for them. It grew into a general editor that runs entirely on the phone.

Features

Photo

• Layers. Photos, images, text, emoji, shapes and stickers stack as layers. Drag to move, pinch to resize, twist to rotate, use the corner handle to scale and rotate with one finger, or stretch one way with the handle on each side. Mirror, flip and fade any picture.
• Background remover. One tap cuts the subject out of any image, on the device. The cut-out stays exactly where it was on the canvas, and can get a solid, glow or shadow outline around its shape.
• Eraser and restore brush with a soft or hard edge. Restore paints the original image back in place. Two fingers zoom and pan while you work.
• Crop any image freely or at a fixed ratio, turn and straighten it, or cut it to a circle, heart, star, triangle or diamond. Cropping the photo you started from crops the whole canvas.
• Filters, adjust and effects. Eight looks with a strength slider; brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, tint, hue, fade, vignette and grain; blur, pixelate, posterize, duotone, sharpen, glitch and pop art; blend modes (multiply, screen, overlay and more) for pictures, text, shapes and drawings alike. Hold to compare with the original.
• Draw. Marker, highlighter, neon, dotted, spray and soft pens. Each drawing is a layer you can move, resize and draw more onto.
• Shapes. Rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, arrows, stars and lines, with fill and outline.
• Text. A classic meme font, eight more free caption fonts, the system fonts and your own (.ttf or .otf). Fill, gradient, outline, shadow and glow; bold, italic, underline and capitals; curved text and a perspective slant; a caption box or a speech, thought, shout, pill or double-outline bubble with a tail you can point; one-tap style presets. Double-tap text to edit it.
• Snapping. Layers snap to the center of the canvas and to 0° and 90°, with guide lines.
• Canvas. Original size or 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9 and more, on a color, a blurred copy of the photo or a transparent background (exported as PNG), with an optional frame around the edge and a drop shadow under the picture. Start from a photo or a blank canvas.
• My stickers. Save any cut-out and reuse it in every project, and start from the bundled pack of flat stickers.

Video

• Clips in a row. Add videos and photos, trim them by their ends (step frame by frame), split, duplicate, reorder, replace, mute, freeze a frame, save a frame as a photo, add a plain color clip, and crop, rotate, mirror or flip a clip. Each clip has its own speed, volume, look and entrance and exit animation.
• Speed from 0.2x to 10x, with the voice pitch kept natural (or not, for the chipmunk effect).
• Transitions between clips: dissolve, dip to black or white, zoom, blur, spin, flip, glitch, color split, and wipes, slides and pushes, with the sound crossfaded.
• A timeline with layer tracks. Every caption, sticker, drawing and clip on top gets its own track above the main clip. Drag its ends to choose when it appears and disappears, drag the middle to move it, split it, long-press to reorder, and hide or lock it from the left. Pinch to zoom in on long videos.
• Video over video. Put more clips on top, picture-in-picture style: move, resize, rotate, crop and fade them, start them from the middle, give them their own volume and look, or key out a green screen.
• Blur areas. Blur, pixelate, frost, magnify, triangle-mosaic or halftone faces and usernames with a rectangle, ellipse or heart on its own track, each as strong or subtle as you like.
• Animations. Captions, stickers and shapes fade, pop, zoom or slide in and out, type out letter by letter, or wiggle, pulse and bounce.
• Music and sound. Add songs or the sound of another video, move and trim them on their own tracks, set their volume (up to 200%) and fades; they loop to fill their part. Sound effects come bundled — tap one and it lands at the playhead. Record a voiceover from the playhead, or have the phone's offline voice read a line, with higher, deeper, chipmunk or robot voice effects.
• Canvas. Turn a landscape clip into 9:16 for reels and stories, 1:1, 4:5 or 1:2, zoom and move the clip inside it, with colored bars, a blurred copy of the video, any picture or a gradient behind it.
• Filters and adjust per clip, the same looks as for photos, shown live while you drag.
• What you see is what you export. The preview runs the same edit the exporter does.

Everywhere

• Projects save automatically and reopen exactly as you left them.
• Undo and redo for every edit.
• Images from the web. A built-in browser: search, long-press an image, and it goes straight into the project. It never lands in your gallery.
• Share to Kadar from the gallery or any app to start a project.
• Export to Pictures/Kadar and Movies/Kadar (JPEG, PNG, H.264 MP4 or GIF), or straight to the share sheet. Pick the frame rate and quality of a video and see its size before saving; exports show their progress and can be cancelled.
• English and Bosnian, following the phone's language.

Privacy

Kadar has no accounts, analytics, ads or tracking, and it never uploads your photos or videos.

• Editing and export run entirely on the phone.
• The only feature that uses the internet is the image browser, and only while you use it.
• Background removal uses Google ML Kit on the device. The first time, Google Play services downloads the model (a few MB); after that it works offline. Your images are not sent anywhere.
• The microphone is used only while you record a voiceover, and Android asks first. Recordings stay inside the project. Text to speech uses only the voices installed on the phone that work offline.
• Projects live in the app's private storage. Uninstalling the app deletes them; your exports in the gallery stay.

Install

1. Download kadar-vX.Y.Z.apk from the latest release. Each release also has a .sha256 file if you want to check the download.
2. Open the APK on your phone. Android will ask you to allow installs from your browser or file manager; allow it for that app only.
3. Updates install over the old version and keep your projects, because every release is signed with the same key.

Requirements: Android 10 or newer. Background removal needs Google Play services (standard on almost every phone sold outside China).

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/n-delic/kadar.git
cd kadar
echo "sdk.dir=$HOME/Android/Sdk" > local.properties
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug     # tests + debug APK
./gradlew installDebug                        # install "Kadar Dev" on a connected phone or emulator

You need JDK 17 or newer and the Android SDK with platform 37. Debug builds install as a separate app, Kadar Dev, so they never touch your real projects. Release signing and the full setup are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

How it works

• Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, one module, no DI framework. The UI is custom-drawn on top of Compose.
• One drawing path. The editor, photo export, video overlay and thumbnails all draw layers with the same Android Canvas code, so exports match the screen.
• Media3. The video edit is a Media3 Composition: trim, speed, pitch, volume, music and canvas size are effects on it. CompositionPlayer previews it and Transformer exports it, with timed layers rendered as an overlay.
• ML Kit Subject Segmentation for cut-outs.
• Projects are a folder per project with a project.json (versioned, written atomically) and the images they use.

The code map and the rules for changing it are in AGENTS.md; plans are in ROADMAP.md.

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md first. In short: keep changes small, add a test for logic, try the change on a phone or emulator, and only add assets under an open license, listed in ATTRIBUTION.md.

FAQ

Is it really free? Yes. No paid tier, no watermark, no ads. It's open source under the GPL.

Why isn't it on Google Play? Not yet. For now releases are published here as APKs.

Can I use images from the web browser in my posts? That depends on the image. Kadar only makes downloading easier; you are responsible for having the right to use what you import.

Does it work offline? Everything except the image browser, and the one-time background-remover download.

License and credits

Kadar is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, with an additional permission for linking with Google Play services and ML Kit (NOTICE). You may use, study, share and change it; if you distribute a modified version, you must publish its source under the same license.

Kadar is an independent implementation written from scratch. It contains no code, decompiled code, icons, images, fonts, stickers or presets from any other photo or video app; its workflow follows the observable behavior of common mobile editors, and no other app's code or binaries were examined. Every bundled asset is openly licensed and listed in ATTRIBUTION.md. See NOTICE.

Built with AndroidX Media3, Jetpack Compose and ML Kit. Fonts: Anton, Plus Jakarta Sans and Bebas Neue, Oswald, Archivo Black, Bangers, Caveat Brush, Comic Neue, Pacifico and Creepster from Google Fonts (all OFL). Icons: Material Symbols (Apache 2.0). The corgi in the screenshots is a CC0 photo from Wikimedia Commons.

_{Android, Google Play and ML Kit are trademarks of Google LLC. All other product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Kadar is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Google or by the makers of any other photo or video editing app.}