A collection of free/public APIs you can use to build stuff

[zerop]

Nice list. I looked at a few now. But since these are public/free APIs, I would be careful using them into production work, mainly for stability/scale reasons. Good for research/Prototype etc, IMO.

[Stevvo]

Some free APIs run by governments provide fairly good stability as they fall under the umbrella of "critical infrastructure".

[DrJones1098]

To help with the real time, could maybe add a layer of hot caching or the user could submit a batch job. if one fails, it's not blowing up the request.

[HWR_14]

> But since these are public/free APIs, I would be careful using them into production work, mainly for stability/scale reasons.

Many of the ones I saw are "free up to N requests, then $". That is, things that have a free tier.

Which is still valuable, but is very different if you want to be able to scale. Scaling by writing a larger check is a nice safe path forward.

[asim]

Also see https://public-apis.io for a similar searchable listing of APIs.

[nullify88]

Anyone know of a API to fetch high quality music artist and album art? I've been meaning to make something which sniffs whats playing on my Chromecast and display it on a screen but I've had difficulty finding a good source of art.

Thank you for the suggestions :)

[easrng]

The iTunes has an amazing free API: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...

By default the images it returns are small but you can get the full res ones easily. Here's some example code (not mine): https://github.com/bendodson/itunes-artwork-finder/blob/mast...

[brdbkr]

The Cover Art Archive[1] is a joint project between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz, whose goal is to make cover art images available to everyone on the Internet in an organised and convenient way.

[1] https://coverartarchive.org/

[nonameiguess]

I won't speak to the quality, but that's what libmusicbrainz is for: https://github.com/metabrainz/libmusicbrainz

[tfsh]

Someone else mentioned Spotify, you could try looking into Last.fm[1] (which queries from a number of different sources - spotify, youtube, soundcloud and user contributed artwork).

1: https://www.last.fm/api/show/album.getInfo - looks like it provides three image resolutions - small, medium and large.

[OJFord]

Spotify? Or is that not high quality enough? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

(Or there's a bunch of others in the submission under 'music'.)

[r3trohack3r]

I used Deezer for https://audile.app and have been really happy.

[scns]

I usually get mine manually from [0]. A lot of work, but i get to choose the cover i like best.

[0] https://discogs.com

[areoform]

Does anyone know about an API for getting high resolution book covers? Most of the book covers that are publicly out there are terrible.

[stefanvdw1]

Nice list! I’ve used one of the art APIs listed, the Rijksmuseum one, to built a website which will show you a random object from their massive collection on each button click:

https://randomrijks.com

[LeonB]

rijksroll is right there! (The .com is available)

(Nice work though :))

[egfx]

Anybody know of an API that allows you to generate a temporary static HTML page with custom markup that I can send to it?

[jjice]

Like templating as a service?

[dariusj18]

Sounds like a free hosting service with FTP

[butz]

Would be nice to see a column with request limit, if any.

[willis936]

Obligatory link to the Tom Scott video on free APIs. There's a lot of common knowledge there, but his discussion on free APIs seems relevant. I've been burned by having hobbyist projects break from free APIs getting turned off.

https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

[hibern8]

https://agify.io/

This was in the list. How is this useful at all?

[detaro]

discrimination-as-a-service.

[funshed]

The "Use Cases" are on the bottom of the page. Limited but..

[HWR_14]

Isn't guessing ages (reliably) valuable to marketers?