Lorem Picsum Is My Favorite Free Placeholder Image Service

A shout out to the simple and excellent picsum.photos service, plus now I won’t forget the URL

Lorem Picsum, the “Lorem Ipsum for photos”, is a very simple, very nice, free image placeholder service. As they put it, they provide “easy to use, stylish placeholders.” It’s indispensable whenever I’m putting together a quick demo or test or minimal reproduction or POC. Many similar services generate simple solid gray images with dimensions for wireframe-style usage, but I pretty much never have to create wireframes for my work, so I prefer something that resembles the final product.

The simplest way to use it is to request random images with a particular dimension (you can refresh this page to see different images being chosen at random for these examples). Want a random 1200×800 image? https://picsum.photos/1200/800:

Or how about a square 450×450 grayscale image? https://picsum.photos/450?grayscale:

Or put some blur on it (ranging from 1–10) with https://picsum.photos/900/600/?blur=9:

They have a gallery of all of their images, so you can also render a specific image by adding its id to the URL. This is actually the main way I use it, e.g. https://picsum.photos/id/33/1350/900:

Lastly, they have an API for programmatic usage. It’s powered by fastly, and the images are curated from the asset treasure trove that is Unsplash. Thank you to the creators, David Marby & Nijiko Yonskai!