// the find
odrick/free-tex-packer
Free texture packer
A browser-based and Electron sprite sheet packer that handles the common game dev workflow: drop in images, get out an atlas PNG plus a descriptor file in whatever format your engine expects. Targets Phaser, Pixi, Godot, Cocos2d, Spine, and a handful of others via Mustache templates. The maintainer has explicitly said they're done with feature work — critical bugs only.
The Mustache template system for custom exporters is genuinely useful — you're not locked into the built-in formats and adding a new one is just writing a template file. The ecosystem around it is solid: there's a CLI, a Gulp module, a Grunt plugin, and a webpack plugin, so you can drop it into a build pipeline without touching the GUI. MaxRects bin packing is the right algorithm choice here and it's implemented properly with an OptimalPacker fallback. The web version runs entirely in the browser with no server round-trip for the actual packing.
The repo ships compiled dist files checked into git alongside source, which is a maintenance smell and makes diffs noisy. The maintainer's own README notice ('I don't have time to improve this app anymore') means any adoption is a bet on the current feature set being sufficient — PRs are unlikely to get merged. TinyPNG integration routes through a PHP server script, which is an odd dependency for what is otherwise a pure frontend tool. Localization covers only five languages and the CSV format means contributing translations requires knowing to look in a non-obvious place.