Alibaba Releases Its Own Free Bilingual AI Image Editor

Alibaba now has an AI image editor. Yup, we have another one. The Chinese company launched its own open-source image editing tool, Qwen-Image-Edit, built on its Qwen-Image model. The tool supports both Chinese and English prompts and offers “unique text rendering capabilities to image editing tasks, enabling precise text editing.

Semantic and Appearance Editing

At its core, Qwen-Image-Edit performs two types of editing: semantic and appearance. Semantic editing allows you to change the meaning or concept of an image–rotating objects, creating new IP, or applying style transfers. The neat trick here is: your results stay consistent across images. On the other hand, appearance editing lets you modify specific elements. These include clothing, backgrounds, and even text, without affecting the rest of the image.

Text Editing

One of its most notable features is bilingual text editing. Qwen-Image-Edit can directly add, remove, or modify text within an image. The company claims that, while editing, the editor keeps the original font, size, and layout intact. Even though this feature has been generally improving in AI tools, it still needs some work. And judging from Alibaba’s sample images, it works quite nice, at least for them. Just like prompting, this feature also works for both Chinese and English.

Alibaba explains that its image editor works by passing the input image through two separate pathways: Qwen2.5-VL for understanding the image’s content and a VAE Encoder for preserving its visual style. This dual setup helps it manage complex edits with great detail and consistency.

Examples

Alibaba shows quite a few examples of its image editor’s capabilities. They include rotating objects to reveal different angles, swapping artistic styles (like turning a portrait into a Studio Ghibli-style illustration, sigh), and progressively correcting handwritten Chinese characters. It can also handle more practical edits like removing small objects, changing background colors, or adjusting clothing.

Availability

As I mentioned, Alibaba’s image editor is free and open-source. The tool reportedly achieves “state-of-the-art” performance in multiple image editing tasks. So, if you’re curious, all the assets are available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. There’s also a Discord channel, but I wasn’t able to open it at the time of writing this. I’ll make sure to follow up if I manage to play with it!

[via PetaPixel]

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