Photopea - A Piece of My World Crumbles

For every semester each course gets a new image in our LMS (learning management system).  One course, the gaming course ("The Art and Science of Computer Games"), took a bit more time because I'd program a list of objects to create a pattern, e.g., a list of fish with each fish rotated slightly from the previous one.  The only concern was getting the image cropped and resized.  

For many years, Photopea.com, a free online graphics editor was a quick reliable way to do image editing.  The default file type is PhotoShop's PSD file.  For the minimal needs of myself and my students Photopea was fine.  By minimal I mean cropping, magic selection, and exporting an image at different qualities to see the relationship between file size and quality.  Everything else was, as far as I was concerned, a bonus for those who had artistic ability.

When I tried to use Photopea yesterday the app froze, weird things happened when I tried to crop the image.  I loaded the image (left below), used the magic wand to select and then delete the background.  The crop started out fine, but froze when I tried to remove the pixels (right below).

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I thought it might be my computer - it's about 6 years old, but I had the same problem with the laptop which is newer.

In the end I searched for free online graphics editors and eventually found a far from intuitive Total Photo Editor  (freetoolonline.com/photo-editor.html) with which I created the image I needed.

What had been a 10 minute dalliance (the graphics editing being an excuse to listen to music) turned into about 4 hours of frustration.  Sigh.