Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

[O1111OOO]

Just wanted to comment on the clarity and effectiveness of the home page. Love it! So many user-friendly checkboxes are ticked off. Nice look, great description, plenty of examples, advanced usage section that's very easy to take in, credits at the bottom with some backend tech used, a welcoming contact link...

All of this accomplished (landing page and documentation) in just a few scrolls of the mouse. I went from novice to expert in a minute. There was a real effort to communicate with the end-user from an (empathic) end-user perspective.

Even the parsed json page listing a default 30 images (with credits) is easy to navigate with all the pertinent information available - including urls that open in a new tab (so a user doesn't lose their place on the origin page).

You mentioned in another comment that 400 million images are served per month. Yet... it has the feel (and performance and care) of a small static site.

[hliyan]

Exactly. It took me under 30 seconds of scanning through the page to understand most of the API. No fancy badges, abstract graphics or buzzwords, just a direct demonstration of the value. This is how product pages should be.

[dmarby]

Thank you for the kind words!

[yingw787]

This is what API homepages, or at least "Getting Started" pages, should feel like.

[necovek]

It was indeed good.

One minor nitpick is the use of "random" where they mean "arbitrary". :)

Also, it's still a bit unclear how caching of images would work when you append an arbitrary parameter: text implies none of the images would be cached (presumably because of cache headers or browser behaviour), but I'd prefer it if they were indeed cached by browsers as distinct images instead (iow, soft-reloading X/Y?something=foo will give you the same image).

Basically, I'd like them to figure out all the caching semantics and behaviour, and just do the right thing ;)

[vectorEQ]

seconded. very clear and easy to use. good design and nice idea!

[throwaway2016a]

I'm personally partial to PlaceKitten[1] though around halloween I will sometimes switch it up with PlaceZombie[2]

This one looks nice in that you wouldn't be embarrassed if it goes live since the images are generally nice looking but part of the appear of YAPHS (Yet Another Placeholder Service) is that it is really obviously a placeholder so you catch it before it goes live.

[1] https://placekitten.com/ (warning: contains fluffy kittens)

[2] http://placezombie.com/ (warning: contains images of simulated violence)

[chx]

Let's not forget http://placecorgi.com/

I wear corgi t-shirts, carry a little felt corgi keyring charm, have unicorgi stickers on laptop and tech bag both, my lunch bag is printed with corgis... there's a pattern here.

[theon144]

placekitten inadvertently led to one of my favourite commit messages: "Increase kitten resolution" :)

[droptablemain]

Hah, I checked the comments specifically to toss in a placekitten link :)

[ndusan-hn]

What's with ppl and kittens!? :)

[neilpanchal]

Tangentially, I got tired of Lorem Ipsum text and created Quantum Lorem Ipsum, now with 100% more physics jargon.

http://neil.panchal.io/articles/quantum-lorem-ipsum/

https://github.com/neilpanchal/quantum-lorem-ipsum

Edit: Created a Github repo

[ebg13]

I feel like this misses the entire purpose of lorem ipsum. Good layout designers don't just want letters and spaces. They want letters and spaces that approximate the whitespace ratio of writing. Your version has only very long words and very short words and nothing in between. This feels like the telephone game version where all of the original intent has been lost and all that's left is a weak simulacrum in vaguely the same symbol space.

[kevsim]

I'm partial to Bacon Ipsum https://baconipsum.com

[tapland]

I like it, but isn't one of the points of lorem ipsum that few people understand the meaning of any word and therefore get distracted? I just like to sneak-read yours a lot.

[firmgently]

This is my favourite https://www.bobrosslipsum.com/

[verall]

It's incredible.

I feel like after reading just a few words my eyes glaze over, but its still English. Even if I jump around, its all proper grammar nonsense.

Thank you!

[orblivion]

I was hoping it was quantum woo jargon.

[wrycoder]

Doesn't do what lorem ipsum does, but you might try submitting a journal article.

[andrei_says_]

There’s also the space ipsum with space exploration quotes.

[nkg]

that's funny!

[fxfan]

a Loren ipsum I will actually use. now if only plain tex would include this as a package

[berbec]

Normally, I don't think much of the name of a product. Descriptive, flowerly, pie-in-the-sky, complete bs, etc.

This one is genius.

[olalonde]

I strongly suspect the name came first.

[kumarm]

Anyone notice the CDN they are using (https://www.belugacdn.com)? Looks like their pricing is 1/10 of S3 and GCP.

Anyone used belugacdn before? Care to share your experience?

[busymom0]

Somebody researched a bunch of CDNs and compared them:

https://www.custompcguide.net/keycdn-vs-bunnycdn-vs-belugacd...

[PetahNZ]

FWIW S3 is not a CDN, CloudFront is, but yes it seems cheaper. But no doubt there are other differences, like less edges, no lambda@edge, etc.

[jypepin]

I recently launched http://joeschmoe.io, which is a similar API but for illustrated profile pictures. Did pretty well on product hunt and other places, so might be of interest here too :)

[marc_abonce]

Are the photos scraped automatically from Unsplash or are they manually curated in some way? I'm wondering because it looks like that website classifies photos by category (animals, architecture, fashion, food) but that information is not on your API.

I think it would be really useful to be able to get a picture of a random animal or a random landscape rather than just a random anything. But I'm not sure if that's outside of the scope of the project.

[memco]

There’s a very similarly named “Loren Pixel” service which offers categories (but from a different image set): http://lorempixel.com/

[dmarby]

They are mostly from Unsplash's curated collections a few years ago.

[pvorb]

This looks neat and might come in handy. I'm concerned about the legitimation, though.

Citing from https://unsplash.com/license:

> This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.

I'd argue this is exactly the type of "similar or competing service" that is meant by this sentence.

Edit: Did Unsplash give their consent?

[dmarby]

This site pre-dates the Unsplash license (and before Unsplash had their own API/website even, it started when they were still a tumblr blog), the images used on it is from back when Unsplash still licensed images under CC0.

We're on good terms with the Unsplash team, and think they're awesome.

[wtracy]

I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen a placeholder service that serves up ads in the images. The service gets revenue, and the dev gets something that's obviously not a final product.

[jbkkd]

Simple service, easy to use, gets the job done, good selection of beautiful photos and great documentation on the open source repo. I'm sold

[an4rchy]

Great name! Also, seems like a nifty, simple and useful service for quick prototyping.

This seems like a bandwidth heavy service. I am curious to hear how you are thinking about managing/scaling this.

[dmarby]

The service has actually been around since about 2014, currently, we serve about 400 million images a month, using some 6TB of bandwidth. It's pretty manageable since we use a CDN on top of the service, to cache already processed images.

Hoping to do a write-up of the architecture in the future, but the source and deployment setup is available at https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos if you're interested

[n_u_l_l]

What is the difference between this and Unsplash Source[1]?

[1]. https://source.unsplash.com/

[graphememes]

According to github looks like this came first. Seems like unsplash's attempt at making this? However this service doesn't seem to have rate limiting like theirs.

[dosshell]

Wonderful, this may be.. IS the best product website I have ever seen!

If you have not thought about it: images does not really work for place holders for charts. Maybe placeholders for pie-, bar- and line-charts etc, can be a feature to come?

[ndusan-hn]

I've used this plain placeholder (https://placeholder.com/) and it worked nice, but this looks like next level :) Thanks!

[gloflo]

What is your privacy policy? Do you store any information about the users?

[dmarby]

There's Google Analytics on the website. For the API/service, there's no user/usage information being stored, other than aggregated bandwidth/total requests for the entire service, by our CDN provider, BelugaCDN. You can find the source code, as well as the deployment setup here: https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos

[anbop]

How is something like this funded? Doesn’t this cost money to host?

[codesections]

Cool project. Last time I looked, the image selection was a bit lacking—in fact, I blogged about choosing between Lorem Picsum and several alternatives a couple months ago: https://www.codesections.com/blog/guide-to-placeholder-image...

I eventually settled on Pixabay, but if Lorem Picsum has added more images recently, I might need to give it another look.

[blackbrokkoli]

This seems to be built on top of the unsplash API. That is of course ok, but does it provide any relevant additional functionality?

You can literally use https://source.unsplash.com/random/800x600 (with or w/o the dimension) and get the same result, one level less abstract.

Meanwhile, filter() in CSS provides both greyscale and blur with way more power.

I like your homepage - but what does this add to my workflow?

[yaleman]

Hipster ipsum (https://hipsum.co/) is (good|bad) if you want text :)

[40four]

Looks like this is not the first service like this, but I'll be honest, I wasn't aware they exist! Haha!

This one might win the contest on beat name though. I feel like it's a "Doh!! Why didn't I think of that!" moment.

Really cool, great work!