
Lorempixum: Generate placeholder images (not just gray boxes) - rondevera
http://lorempixum.com/
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panacea
This isn't quite 'lorem ipsum but with pictures'.

You could use actual dummy text instead of lorem ipsum. ie: "This is dummy
text. This is a sentence that talks about sport as the copy for this section
will be inserted later to discuss sport."

The purpose of lorem ipsum is to remove distractions. It's textual noise to
say "here is where text will go, and how long it can be, but we're not
focussing on copy at the moment".

These randomly generated actual pictures are still worth 'a thousand words',
as it were, instead of saying nothing like lorem ipsum does.

I thought this might generate the equivalent to lorem ipsum text before I
clicked through and was disappointed.

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bane
I have to agree. Early on in our page design, we had some nice hi-res pictures
we were using as placeholders. The problem was that it made the rest of the
page elements look better at first glance than they actually were. Once we
knocked out the images, we realized the page looked like crap and we had to go
back to the drawing board.

(not saying our page looks great now, but it's definitely progressed from some
pretty ragged looking early versions)

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antiterra
Nice, but there's no option for "cats only." As a result, I'm afraid I'll
stick to <http://placekitten.com/> for now.

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ugh
placekitten was actually the inspiration for this website (to make it possible
to show pages with placeholder images to humorless clients).

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pflats
Humorless clients wouldn't mind <http://lorempixum.com/300/400/sports/10/>
<http://lorempixum.com/300/400/sports/4/> or
<http://lorempixum.com/300/400/fashion/7/> ?

~~~
ugh
They probably would. (It’s not my website, I only know its history.)

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chriskelley
I'm actually partial to keeping FPO images as default and gray as possible.
That way everybody knows exactly what is temporary, and there is no confusion.

"Everything looks great but we're not crazy about the vegetable picture you
chose."

"...Yes we agree, that is a temporary image and can be ignored."

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blue1
The reason why "lorem ipsum" is latin is that since the language is almost
extinct, it looks like real copy but it's very difficult that someone can send
it to the printer by mistake, thinking it's the final text. (by the way,
perhaps to typeset for the Vatican press they use something else...)

So, placing a real image as a placeholder is not a good idea.

~~~
gigawatt
Lorem Ipsum is actually abstracted one layer further. It's based on some text
by Cicero, but it has been altered so it wouldn't even be readable if you knew
Latin.

~~~
blue1
Part of the Lorem Ipsum from Adobe is a pseudo-latin translation of a pseudo
Rudy VanderLaans text on typography, concerning the legibility of typefaces.
It's a rather convoluted insider joke.

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DTrejo
_Get placeholders related to the site you are developing, by pulling images
from flickr based on tags_

<http://flickholdr.com/>

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antiterra
That's actually pretty cool, and would work well if you curate your own image
set with a unique tag.

Otherwise, it adds a bit of risk if you have sensitive clients. "Nurse" and
"nursing" can return photos of nurses at work, a nurse smoking a cigarette in
an old ad, women in sexy nurse costumes, or a river otter. The quality is also
extremely variable.

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mrspeaker
I'm a big fan of all these image generator thingos. I made yet-another-
placeholder-generator too ( <http://mrspeaker.github.com/lowersrc/> ). The
thing I like about my one is that it's all done client-side - not all my
clients have the best internets ;)

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orionlogic
I use Placehold.it extensively. Most of the time wireframing requires non
image placeholders.
[http://placehold.it/320x210&text=Hacker+News](http://placehold.it/320x210&text=Hacker+News)

~~~
pdenya
I second this, I use placehold.it constantly whenever I'm building with html
or css. I never use the text feature like the link above, it defaults to
showing the image size and I've found that to be more useful because it's a
quick reference designers or project managers or anyone else can use to figure
out the size requirements for that images replacement.

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jarin
I can't tell you how happy I am that there is finally a placeholder image
service that will serve up _different_ images of the same size on a single
page.

Just add a query string:
"<http://lorempixum.com/230/180/fashion?#{rand(10000)}>

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DanielStraight
This has been done before, but this is a particularly nice version. One
because of all the options and two because the pictures are really cool.

Thanks for sharing.

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Sidnicious
These services are quite cool, but I keep getting bizarre/distracting images
(read: not great as placeholders).

For instance: <http://lorempixum.com/output/sports-h-g-640-1920-8.jpg>,
<http://lorempixum.com/output/fashion-h-c-300-420-7.jpg>

~~~
WiseWeasel
<http://lorempixum.com/640/1920/sports/8/>
<http://lorempixum.com/300/420/fashion/7/>

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nathanlrivera
This is very very cool. However I noticed something familiar about the logo:

<http://www.brumfieldhay.com/images/PurinaLogo_LG.JPG>

Personally I would change it to avoid trademark issues. Although you might be
okay as long as you don't use a red colored version of your logo.

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davidw
Oh, cool, that's a great way of solving a problem I need to solve with
LiberWriter. Thanks for the inspiration!

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rbanffy
I liked the one with cats better.

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arpit
I loved placekitten.com, can we have one that does Star Wars images? :P

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eekfuh
Gotta say, I love the domain.

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JCB_K
I usually just drop in a picture of Will Ferrell as Elf. Works for me!

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GrandMasterBirt
<http://placekitten.com/> is superior

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kennywinker
nice, but this is better <http://placekitten.com/>

