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Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos
- berbec 7y agoNormally, 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 7y agoI strongly suspect the name came first.
- graphememes 7y agoIf I remember correctly it used to be unsplash.it, github seems to confirm.
- dmarby 7y agoThat's correct! We changed the name to avoid it being confused with unsplash.com as the sites grew in traffic
- cyberferret 7y agoAh, I was just about to say that this looks like unsplash.it (which we actually use in our SaaS to generate random images on our 404 and 500 error screens [0]). Glad to see that it is one and the same! [0] - https://medium.com/@dsabar/error-messages-don-t-have-to-be-boring-ddb8f211451f https://medium.com/@dsabar/error-messages-don-t-have-to-be-b... EDIT: Wonder it we will have to change the domain on our app to point to this new domain, or will the old unsplash.it one still be used going forward?
- dmarby 7y agoThat’s a really cool use of Picsum! The old domain will keep working, but I’d encourage you to switch to the new one. It’ll save you a redirect as well :)
- uberman 7y agoHow does this service distinguish itself from any of the other image placeholder services out there?
- amanzi 7y agoI haven't seen any other image placeholder services that look similar to this. Can you share some examples?
- throwaway2016a 7y agoMy favorite is PlaceKitten I've been using it for a decade. Though it sounds like this one is equally old: http://www.ecologytheme.com/top-10-image-placeholder-services/ http://www.ecologytheme.com/top-10-image-placeholder-service... There are literally dozens of them.
- PavlovsCat 7y agohttp://lorempixel.com/ http://lorempixel.com/ It's pretty old, too. https://www.awwwards.com/sites/lorempixum https://www.awwwards.com/sites/lorempixum
- blotter_paper 7y agoAt the top of the lorempixel page it says they used to be lorempixum.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoYes, I know that. First link is the service, second is the award they won in 2008.
- blotter_paper 7y agoI was noting it for the interest of the general reader, since the incredibly similar "Lorem Picsum" is garnering so much praise in this comments section.
- gloflo 7y agoWhat is your privacy policy? Do you store any information about the users?
- dmarby 7y agoThere'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 https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos
- an4rchy 7y agoGreat 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 7y agoThe 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 https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos if you're interested
- cbluth 7y agoI've checked out the source, thanks. I'll say that a write up on the architecture would be very interesting, if you ever make it then please post it on HN.
- pvorb 7y agoThis looks neat and might come in handy. I'm concerned about the legitimation, though. Citing from https://unsplash.com/license 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 7y agoThis 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.
- pvorb 7y agoThank you for the clarification.
- marc_abonce 7y agoAre 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.
- throwaway2016a 7y agoI'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/ https://placekitten.com/ (warning: contains fluffy kittens) [2] http://placezombie.com/ http://placezombie.com/ (warning: contains images of simulated violence)
- droptablemain 7y agoHah, I checked the comments specifically to toss in a placekitten link :)
- chx 7y agoLet's not forget http://placecorgi.com/ 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.
- adzm 7y ago... do you have a corgi?
- chx 7y agoNo. I live in a pet free building and also travel too much for the poor thing to be left alone. I didn't mention five corgi plushies: one memory foam pillow and four Unicorgis. One pair of the Unicorgis are set to fly -- they had wings and the previous owner left hooks in the ceiling so it was pretty self evident what I needed to do...
- kennyadam 7y agoHow quirky!
- herpderperator 7y agoI don't like the fact that it's /200/300, it should be /200x300. The slash makes it more difficult to read, i.e. in the example: https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/300 https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/300, it would be much easier to read and understand if it were https://picsum.photos/id/237/200x300 https://picsum.photos/id/237/200x300. Terrible decision.
- echelon 7y ago"Terrible"? Come on. Sometimes we are way too harsh and pedantic on each other. Instead of trying to help each other grow, we call our fellow engineers out for making decisions we disagree with. This service is offered for free, and new routes can likely be added without trouble. It isn't like this is a choice that actually impacts anyone. It's merely a matter of style. The only thing terrible here is the way the criticism is being offered. So I'm offering you feedback.
- herpderperator 7y agoI guess it is not "terrible". I think the product can be improved in the manner suggested since it's heavily reliant on typing URLs manually, and I'm curious why the current format was selected. I am not discounting the entire product just because I am commenting on a very specific part of it. It is a great site and idea, and I think many people have already suggested that.
- sinsterizme 7y agoPerhaps you could have said something positive before aggressively criticizing. There’s an art to constructive feedback
- Theodores 7y agohttps://placeimg.com/800/600 https://placeimg.com/800/600 Common pattern for such a service. There is no 'id' in the path, that isn't how it works, you just want the one path component for the size in order to return a square image and then if you give a second path component you get the y dimension. It is as simple as that.
- ameliozanchi 7y agoWhat does it use to random images?(retoric?.)
- n_u_l_l 7y agoWhat is the difference between this and Unsplash Source[1]? [1]. https://source.unsplash.com/ https://source.unsplash.com/
- graphememes 7y agoAccording 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.
- neilpanchal 7y agoTangentially, 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/ http://neil.panchal.io/articles/quantum-lorem-ipsum/ https://github.com/neilpanchal/quantum-lorem-ipsum https://github.com/neilpanchal/quantum-lorem-ipsum Edit: Created a Github repo
- nkg 7y agothat's funny!
- andrei_says_ 7y agoThere’s also the space ipsum with space exploration quotes.
- fxfan 7y agoa Loren ipsum I will actually use. now if only plain tex would include this as a package
- orblivion 7y agoI was hoping it was quantum woo jargon.
- ebg13 7y agoI 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.
- stephenr 7y agoThis also misses that Lorem Ipsum is effectively gibberish for most people. It's impossible to get hung up on the content.
- jbkkd 7y agoSimple service, easy to use, gets the job done, good selection of beautiful photos and great documentation on the open source repo. I'm sold
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoI love this. Simple service. It's useful. I hope this goes somewhere.
- kumarm 7y agoAnyone notice the CDN they are using (https://www.belugacdn.com https://www.belugacdn.com)? Looks like their pricing is 1/10 of S3 and GCP. Anyone used belugacdn before? Care to share your experience?
- PetahNZ 7y agoFWIW 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.
- busymom0 7y agoSomebody researched a bunch of CDNs and compared them: https://www.custompcguide.net/keycdn-vs-bunnycdn-vs-belugacdn-cloudfront-performance-compare-review/ https://www.custompcguide.net/keycdn-vs-bunnycdn-vs-belugacd...
- kumarm 7y agoThank you. Thats helpful.
- O1111OOO 7y agoJust 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.
- dmarby 7y agoThank you for the kind words!
- hliyan 7y agoExactly. 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.
- vectorEQ 7y agoseconded. very clear and easy to use. good design and nice idea!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yingw787 7y agoThis is what API homepages, or at least "Getting Started" pages, should feel like.
- necovek 7y agoIt 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 ;)
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoThis is really cool. Will use this :)
- nkg 7y agoI will use this everywhere.
- busymom0 7y agoSomebody should built an equivalent for gifs and videos
- ricardobeat 7y agoHas there been some kind of relaunch? Service was unreachable last Friday.
- dmarby 7y agoWe switched over from our old NodeJS backend to a new Go backend recently, and gave the website an overhaul as well, things were a bit shaky during the transition.
- hamdouni 7y agoThat NodeJS to Go definitely needs a write-up :-)
- abhilash1in 7y agoAny reason for the transition from the old NodeJS backend to the new Go backend? Did NodeJS hinder the performance in any way?
- dmarby 7y agoI wrote the old codebase ~4 years ago when I was just learning NodeJS, and didn't touch it too much after that, so it was in dire need of being replaced, in particular since it wasn't really written to scale horizontally. Didn't have any particular issues with NodeJS in terms of performance, just felt like using Go when I was rewriting it.
- wtracy 7y agoI'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.
- kensai 7y agoCool idea!
- welly 7y agoI'm not sure I'd personally use such a service. I see enough ads on a day to day basis without specifically seeking out more.
- arendtio 7y agoPlaceholders are meant to have no 'message'. In general, ads have messages. Might be a bit difficult to find common ground.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI wonder if an ad company will now get the idea to purchase picsum and (eventually) serve ads.
- 40four 7y agoLooks 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!
- anbop 7y agoHow is something like this funded? Doesn’t this cost money to host?
- ackbar03 7y agoCurious about this as well, newbiehere
- amitmerchant 7y agodid you see carbon ads on their homepage?
- dmarby 7y agoIt does indeed. DigitalOcean is kind enough to sponsor the infrastructure, and BelugaCDN provides us with CDN services. Any other costs I cover out of pocket / via carbon ads.
- celicaraptor 7y agoHow did this sponsorship take place?I have a free server from a goverment program for University Students,but i am curious if you contacted them and talked about your project and they agreed.Same for Beluga
- yaleman 7y agoHipster ipsum (https://hipsum.co/ https://hipsum.co/) is (good|bad) if you want text :)
- jypepin 7y agoI recently launched http://joeschmoe.io 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 :)
- strictfp 7y agoHello from Realms!
- blackbrokkoli 7y agoThis 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 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?
- dmarby 7y agoThis service isn't built on top of the Unsplash API, in-fact, it predates it.
- tikumo 7y agoIve used lorem pixum for a long time, how is this different...?
- ndusan-hn 7y agoI've used this plain placeholder (https://placeholder.com/ https://placeholder.com/) and it worked nice, but this looks like next level :) Thanks!
- dosshell 7y agoWonderful, 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?
- TomK32 7y agoThis needs some support to query by tags to turn into something awesomer.
- arendtio 7y agoLove at first sight!
- xiphmont 7y agoDamn. I thought it said Lorem Piscum. I'm so disappointed.
- zahreeley 7y agoAwesome. One correction needed. Can below json element be array instead? "url": "https://unsplash.com/..." https://unsplash.com/...", "download_url": "https://picsum.photos/..." https://picsum.photos/..."
- edgarvaldes 7y agoSimilar: lorempixel.com https://placeholder.com/ https://placeholder.com/
- codesections 7y agoCool 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-images/ 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]