
Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code - thehodge
http://placekitten.com/
======
famfamfam
Mark here, I threw placekitten.com together this weekend after a journey on a
train in which I could not access placehold.it and few weeks of jokes about
the concept with colleagues.

I was not planning on posting to HN, as I thought that a kitten-meme related
site might not be the most appropriate (looks like the wisdom of the crowd has
decided otherwise).

I can't claim that the server will stand up, so I would refrain from using the
site for anything critical (not sure why you would need/want to), or that
caching is entirely correct (I'm sending far-future expires, but I'm sure that
I could improve given some time).

Glad that the internet likes kittens though. Confirmed a suspicion I had.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Wondering where you got all the pictures from? Is this a gray area of
copyright? I'm asking because I've tried to source large amount of pictures in
the past will little luck.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
<http://placekitten.com/attribution.html>

------
Eliezer
AAAAAHHHHHHH there's pictures of kittens at the top of HackerNews!

~~~
axod
If ever there was proof needed to show just how far HN has fallen...

Perhaps time for me to move on.

~~~
jxcole
I know it's easy to be negative about kittens because of the whole lol cats
thing, but a service which provides free, sizable, placeholder images that are
more than just gray boxes is actually pretty useful. Remember the days when
people used to use "blah blah blah" for all of their text before the copy was
in? Now we use Lorem Ipsum. These kittens may well be what we do for
photographs in the future.

~~~
JonnieCache
I agree. This (or a similar tool) is set to become a genuinely useful part of
my web development toolkit.

If it used random CC images from flickr, rather than kittens, I wonder if
there would be so much objection.

If you let the /b/tards' love of kittens forever bond the "kitten" symbol in
your brain indelibly to the "idiocy" symbol, you are letting the /b/tards win.
They are just mammals. (Kittens, not /b/tards.)

However, it probably doesn't warrant the #1 spot.

~~~
kellishaver
I was about to post the exact same thing. It would be cool if there was a
service that pulled CC licensed photos from Flickr for this purpose and scaled
them according to the user's wishes, pulling from an archive of photos based
on aspect ratio, size, etc.

------
yread
You could use this one for code:

    
    
    	 /\_/| 
    	 =0-0=
    	 \'I'|
    	 |<|,,\_
    	 |[>,,/,\ 
    	 |[|,\_,,)
    	 ((J(=__/

~~~
rbanffy

    	 /*_/| 
    	 =0-0=
    	 \'I'|
    	 |<|,,\_
    	 |[>,,/,\ 
    	 |[|,\_,,)
    	 ((J(=_*/
    

This one is valid C/C++/ObjC, Java, PHP, CSS...

~~~
Stormbringer
Brilliant!! This was actually what I was expecting.

But it makes me think - are there any code editors that you can literally just
drag pictures in, or put in urls and it replaces them with pictures? I could
be stuck in some IDE ghetto and not even know about these things.

~~~
rbanffy
You can probably do that with Emacs ;-)

~~~
lanstein
the code to do it starts with (

~~~
rbanffy
It shouldbe a minor mode that renders images instead of image-like URLs. Not
that impossible to do. It's a bit beyond my magical powers, but I am sure it
also ends with a ")"

~~~
leif
auctex does the rendering-inside-text part, but I don't know of one that does
it for html img tags

can't be hard

~~~
limmeau
There's aview (ASCII-art image viewer which uses libaa); aview can render
Ascii pictures to stdout.

~~~
leif
aview solves a different problem

------
alex_c
It feels so strange to upvote a link to kitten images on HN _and actually have
it be on topic_.

------
rayboyd
I'll get downvoted to oblivion for this, not that I care. But what the hell is
this doing at the top of HN.

~~~
ryanjmo
Honestly, it seems really relevant to me. The idea is great, a lot of people
will end up using it and it has a cute/wow factor.

It also servers as a reminder that the Internet loves kittens and other
ridiculous things. It is important to not forget this general principle and to
keep it in mind when designing your product.

People are ridiculous; remember to use that to your advantage.

------
sudont
The less distracting version: <http://placehold.it/>

~~~
eam
Or <http://dummyimage.com/>

~~~
kingkool68
placehold.it and dummyimage.com are one in the same. Source code is available
at dummyimage.com

------
msarnoff
Now someone needs to write a proxy that replaces all images on a site with
placekittens, à la Upside-Down-Ternet (<http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-
down-ternet.html>) and Kittenify (<http://www.reload.me.uk/kittenify>).

~~~
gerwitz
I just learned of Placekitten and had to drop everything and write
bookmarklets: <http://hans.gerwitz.com/projects/placekitten.html>

I didn't know about Kittenify, but they have better code. Though Placekitten
has nicely curated images. A marriage is inevitable.

------
nicpottier
Nice, tiny suggestion for improvement. Allow links to end in .jpg.

There are some cases where that's a nice to have. Otherwise, hilariously
useful.

------
code_duck
I'd like to have bindings for various languages, to be able to use it like

    
    
        placeholder=new Kitten('random');

~~~
sharkbrainguy
Here's javascript, the other languages are left as an exercise.

    
    
        function Kitten(width, height, color) {
            var img, g, w, h;
    
            w = parseInt(width,  10);
            h = parseInt(height, 10);
            g = color ? "" : "g/";
            img = document.createElement('img');
            img.src = "http://placekitten.com/" + g + w + "/" + h;
            img.width = w;
            img.height = h;
    
            return img;
        };

------
thehodge
I know theres a similar service with placeholder images but everyone loves
kittens right?

~~~
petercooper
Congratulations on your entry to the HN1K club ;-)

------
ajaimk
Wasn't it a goal of Hacker News to NOT have kittens at the top of the page?

------
aantix
Along the same lines: for all of the Rails developers out there, I wrote a gem
called "Sex It Up" that downloads and caches public domain images of famous
artwork and sculptures.

Definitely improves the look of any prototype.

<https://github.com/aantix/sex_it_up>

~~~
soult
One thing: You should change the name. I was expecting a totally different
kind of pictures and was kind of afraid to even click the link.

~~~
aantix
Never thought of the NSFW implications.. Thanks for the headsup on this.

------
JonnieCache
I had been using pictures of cucumbers culled from flickr up until this point.
Good call.

------
roryokane
It appears that using the /g/… URL variation gives one black-and-white
pictures, and leaving it out gives one color pictures, but it would be nice if
you would just say that on the home page, rather than leaving us to experiment
and figure it out for ourselves. Leaving out the explanation might be
excusable if two sample links on the homepage just led to color and black-and-
white versions of the same kitten picture, but that isn’t the case.

------
defroost
This is actually something that I would use. I always need dummy images to use
as placeholders for layouts. Sometimes I'll use some of my digital images, but
then I'm dealing with 300 DPI 15 megapixel images that need to resized in
Photoshop, which is kind of a hassle. And as a cat lover, and fan of good
photography (am a sucker for nice B&W images) this is a win-win option.
Bookmarked.

~~~
kingkool68
<http://dummyimage.com> is your friend :)

------
rriepe
Cool idea!

My co-founder and I used to use pictures of Olivia Wilde as placeholders. It
started with just one and then became a sort of tradition.

Kittens are cool too, though.

------
tomelders
Recently I've been thinking of a career change. But this, surprisingly, is the
first time I've smiled about web development in a long time.

------
rudd
While I wait for the site to load, I figured I'd comment with my own
placeholder-cat experience. A site I worked on was taking a while to get me
the actual images, so I took to Pixelmator and fixed myself some LOLcat
placeholders. People loved it, except for one of the QAs, who said it was
going to give her nightmares.

------
rdl
A long time ago, I used to use intentionally-obscene or otherwise offensive
text and images for placeholders, lorem ipsum text, variable names, etc., on
the theory that this would prevent that content from ever shipping.

It only took one violation for this theory to be discarded. Luckily, the
recipient was fairly cool :)

------
jdp23
And according to the weather report, it's snowing in hell right now. Looks
like the week's off to a good start!

------
pavel_lishin
Is this incredibly slow for anyone else?

------
briandeweese
i think a better name would have been loremkitten.com

------
timinman
Great! Maybe server-side cache the images so they only need to be generated
once?

------
mkr-hn
More kittens to waste time at work with:
<http://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/cat/>

And I guess you could see if they'd let you use some of their pictures. :)

------
HaloZero
Could each dimension (at least popular ones) contain multiple images? Like
serving placekitten.com/200/100 is one of three or four random images?

~~~
jankassens
That would avoid caching, an option would be an optional suffix like
placekitten.com/200/100/2

------
raminf
A couple months ago I ended up spending good money on iStockPhoto looking for
the right kitten picture to put in my app's 404 page.

If only I had waited.

------
pacomerh
For a second it felt like Digg in here, people talking about content
degradation. The idea was fine, just a placeholder nothing more.

------
jwb119
This is some sort of bizarro Erlang Day, right??

------
cubtastic71
That's awesome as our dev team here has a folder full of FPO kitties as we
call them. Nice to see Front End folks think alike!

------
ulf
The Kitten-Color-Clock: <https://gist.github.com/849093>

------
B0Z
Am I the only one who checked if "placepuppy" was already registered after
seeing this?

------
100k
Yea! Kitties! I like it.

cf: <http://xkcd.com/231/>

------
chadcf
I plan to combine this with the jQuery konami code plugin for lots of fun.

------
zwieback
I work on a headless embedded system - what should I do?

------
jefe78
I see no kittens....

Using Chrome and thoroughly disappointed.

------
ittan
Meh, 404s need to be fixed though ;)

~~~
ittan
<http://placekitten.com/{string}/{string}>

I know thats not the point but a funny error would be nice... :D

~~~
irfn
404 is the right code for such things.

------
ericnakagawa
I applaud your effort. ;)

------
NoSalt
GENIUS

------
tastybites
Somebody should make one for pictures of corporate stock art. You know, the
glass skyscraper shot, the white-guy-wearing-glasses-standing-over-laptop, the
empty board room with leather chairs, etc...

------
GrandMasterBirt
Its awesome but there is only one feature I request: Add an ability to send
arbitrary parameters at the end which will be used in the uniqueness
calculation to generate a unique photo. This way I can have 10 identical
kitten photo sizes next to each other each with a different picture for 10x
the cuteness.

------
mathnode
KITTEH!

------
simonhamp
Another stroke of awesome!

------
ringm
And in a few months they will all be replaced with goatse...

------
relequestual
I've been WAITING FOREVER for someone to make this! =D

~~~
relequestual
Errr,why has anyone downvoted this? =s

------
axod
Am I the only one who absolutely detests cats?

They're evil irritating virmin IMHO.

~~~
callmeed
I felt the same way until I married a cat lover. They grew on me after a
couple years.

~~~
astrodust
They have that effect on you: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis>

------
MatthewDP
Free Kitten Wallpapers: <http://placekitten.com/1920/1080> or
<http://placekitten.com/1280/1024> <http://placekitten.com/1024/768> etc.

