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Show HN: Assetroulette – Randomized Assets for Webdesign

66 points by ilovefood 5y ago

ilovefood 5y ago
Hi HN, Since last year I developped many websites for friends that wanted either to start working on their own or just wanted to have a small online presence. While designing I always had problems finding the right pictures / images / stock or design inspiration to get them going so I whipped out a small free project to help me "randomly" find images https://assetroulette.com/ https://assetroulette.com/. You can try it out, it's free, no need for registration, I am not gathering emails or whatever, it's so far just a simple tool I whipped up last weekend to solve a small niche problem I had. Currently hosted on a 3€/month server. It helped me visualize images in their context (web page) to iterate quickly. The issue I was facing was that while some images on stock websites looked cool at first, embedding them almost always looked bad and was a waste of time... This way I can refresh a couple of times and eventually find an image that is relevant (works for CSS too and generally any asset - even user provided ones - on the webpage that can be shuffled until it is satisfactory). I'll leave the website up for a little. I decided to share it because I successfully used it today on a website for a friend that wants to start selling jewelry. I would love to have some feedback, it's still in construction but maybe you can already find a good use of it. Thanks in advance!
failwhaleshark 5y ago
I was like Woah, okay, HN title filter must've made a decapitalization mistake: Random Zoom for bums? No wait, there's an "et" there. French bums and gambling? Oh literal "assets," my bad. :D
Jakobeha 5y ago
For random images there is also https://picsum.photos/ https://picsum.photos/. Also AI generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme. I don't know if the AI generators have an API, or if they like people using their images as random assets. So maybe you can focus on that?
- ilovefood 5y ago
  Really nice, thanks for the heads up. While I was looking for something similar I somehow didn't find picsum.photos, interesting indeed! I stumbled upon placekitten and other services but great to see that the idea I had is actually something done by others too. You're right, I'll check into the AI generated images, I currently have a pretty beefy GPU machine at home that I was searching a use-case for :)
- swyx 5y ago
  also: https://www.placecage.com/ https://www.placecage.com/ https://www.stevensegallery.com/ https://www.stevensegallery.com/ https://www.fillmurray.com/ https://www.fillmurray.com/ more here https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#mock-apis https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#moc...
bckr 5y ago
When I refresh, I still get the same crying kitty image. I think it's supposed to change?
- ilovefood 5y ago
  I think it might have been a small server glitch. It's currently hosted on a 1vCPU 2GB Ram machine trying to keep up with front page traffic. Maybe try again? Is it the same kitten image on the demo page?
  - NietzscheanNull 5y ago
    I get the same meme image on refresh unless I open Chrome DevTools and right-click the refresh button, hitting 'Empty Cache and Hard Reload.' [Edit: looks like a regular hard reload also does the trick.] Seems to me like the image may need to be served with a cache-buster? If it helps, I'm running Chrome version 90.0.4430.212 (64-bit).
  - bckr 5y ago
    Still no dice
beckingz 5y ago
The random_image api just returns a red image. The meme one works well though. This is a game changer for presentations and articles.
- ilovefood 5y ago
  You are right, I just checked it still has the old version deployed for that endpoint. It creates a red image with random dimensions, I will fix it asap. Would you mind expanding on the last part?
  - beckingz 5y ago
    A common type of writing for newsletters, articles, and presentations is to use a meme image of some type every couple of paragraphs. This seems like a good method for doing that. Save time picking out 'the perfect meme' because a random meme will probably be just as good.
    - ilovefood 5y ago
      Understood, that makes total sense. I haven't seen it that way! Thanks for letting me know, I'll keep that in mind since I currently have 0 idea how to make this project viable or if it would be necessary to do so.
      - beckingz 5y ago
        You'd probably need to make it work with medium dot com, as that has weird embed requirements for images? You may also want to provide an option that generates a different meme/image if the api is called from the same page. Example: https://www.williamangel.net/context.html https://www.williamangel.net/context.html Would also fill this niche better if it could do tags like `random_meme?type=ironic` so that it could be used for this purpose, but at that point you'd probably be competing with giphy and a bunch of similar services.
        ilovefood 5y ago
crispyporkbites 5y ago
Once I had a developer use a Meme image as an API response in development. It was funny, but it was surprisingly hard to explain to stakeholders during demos that this was not the real API response. I think I fielded questions from at least four annoyed/confused people asking why the image was there and insisting that it must be changed before we go live. I even got follow up emails asking for timelines on when it would be fixed. So sometimes it's better to just use a real placeholder or something realistic.
- andyana 5y ago
  I think that kind of response is common, and I'm trying to understand why. Does this happen to anyone in other industries? I'm at a loss for words at that kind of shallow thinking.
nexuist 5y ago
Can you add a route for random images of Bubu? I would be very excited for that.
- ilovefood 5y ago
  I will most certainly implement that, wonderful idea! :)

66 points by ilovefood 5y ago

Hi HN, Since last year I developped many websites for friends that wanted either to start working on their own or just wanted to have a small online presence. While designing I always had problems finding the right pictures / images / stock or design inspiration to get them going so I whipped out a small free project to help me "randomly" find images https://assetroulette.com/ https://assetroulette.com/. You can try it out, it's free, no need for registration, I am not gathering emails or whatever, it's so far just a simple tool I whipped up last weekend to solve a small niche problem I had. Currently hosted on a 3€/month server. It helped me visualize images in their context (web page) to iterate quickly. The issue I was facing was that while some images on stock websites looked cool at first, embedding them almost always looked bad and was a waste of time... This way I can refresh a couple of times and eventually find an image that is relevant (works for CSS too and generally any asset - even user provided ones - on the webpage that can be shuffled until it is satisfactory). I'll leave the website up for a little. I decided to share it because I successfully used it today on a website for a friend that wants to start selling jewelry. I would love to have some feedback, it's still in construction but maybe you can already find a good use of it. Thanks in advance!

failwhaleshark 5y ago

I was like Woah, okay, HN title filter must've made a decapitalization mistake: Random Zoom for bums? No wait, there's an "et" there. French bums and gambling? Oh literal "assets," my bad. :D

Jakobeha 5y ago

For random images there is also https://picsum.photos/ https://picsum.photos/. Also AI generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme. I don't know if the AI generators have an API, or if they like people using their images as random assets. So maybe you can focus on that?

ilovefood 5y ago
Really nice, thanks for the heads up. While I was looking for something similar I somehow didn't find picsum.photos, interesting indeed! I stumbled upon placekitten and other services but great to see that the idea I had is actually something done by others too. You're right, I'll check into the AI generated images, I currently have a pretty beefy GPU machine at home that I was searching a use-case for :)
swyx 5y ago
also: https://www.placecage.com/ https://www.placecage.com/ https://www.stevensegallery.com/ https://www.stevensegallery.com/ https://www.fillmurray.com/ https://www.fillmurray.com/ more here https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#mock-apis https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#moc...

bckr 5y ago

When I refresh, I still get the same crying kitty image. I think it's supposed to change?

ilovefood 5y ago
I think it might have been a small server glitch. It's currently hosted on a 1vCPU 2GB Ram machine trying to keep up with front page traffic. Maybe try again? Is it the same kitten image on the demo page?
- NietzscheanNull 5y ago
  I get the same meme image on refresh unless I open Chrome DevTools and right-click the refresh button, hitting 'Empty Cache and Hard Reload.' [Edit: looks like a regular hard reload also does the trick.] Seems to me like the image may need to be served with a cache-buster? If it helps, I'm running Chrome version 90.0.4430.212 (64-bit).
- bckr 5y ago
  Still no dice

beckingz 5y ago

The random_image api just returns a red image. The meme one works well though. This is a game changer for presentations and articles.

ilovefood 5y ago
You are right, I just checked it still has the old version deployed for that endpoint. It creates a red image with random dimensions, I will fix it asap. Would you mind expanding on the last part?
- beckingz 5y ago
  A common type of writing for newsletters, articles, and presentations is to use a meme image of some type every couple of paragraphs. This seems like a good method for doing that. Save time picking out 'the perfect meme' because a random meme will probably be just as good.
  - ilovefood 5y ago
    Understood, that makes total sense. I haven't seen it that way! Thanks for letting me know, I'll keep that in mind since I currently have 0 idea how to make this project viable or if it would be necessary to do so.
    - beckingz 5y ago
      You'd probably need to make it work with medium dot com, as that has weird embed requirements for images? You may also want to provide an option that generates a different meme/image if the api is called from the same page. Example: https://www.williamangel.net/context.html https://www.williamangel.net/context.html Would also fill this niche better if it could do tags like `random_meme?type=ironic` so that it could be used for this purpose, but at that point you'd probably be competing with giphy and a bunch of similar services.
      - ilovefood 5y ago

crispyporkbites 5y ago

Once I had a developer use a Meme image as an API response in development. It was funny, but it was surprisingly hard to explain to stakeholders during demos that this was not the real API response. I think I fielded questions from at least four annoyed/confused people asking why the image was there and insisting that it must be changed before we go live. I even got follow up emails asking for timelines on when it would be fixed. So sometimes it's better to just use a real placeholder or something realistic.

andyana 5y ago
I think that kind of response is common, and I'm trying to understand why. Does this happen to anyone in other industries? I'm at a loss for words at that kind of shallow thinking.

nexuist 5y ago

Can you add a route for random images of Bubu? I would be very excited for that.

ilovefood 5y ago
I will most certainly implement that, wonderful idea! :)