Free image placeholder services to generate dummy images

Don’t waste time and effort finding and cropping custom images yourself.

(This article was last updated on 23 May 2018)

When you’re building website templates, user interfaces or initial application prototypes there is often the need for placeholder images or dummy images. Rather than wasting time and effort finding and cropping custom images you can simply use a free image placeholder service that will automatically create an image for you with your specified dimensions. Here are some of the best free image placeholder services on offer.

placehold.it

A clean, simple and polished image placeholder service. If you’re looking for a minimalistic approach then this is the way to go as it uses simple grey boxes in place of images e.g.

[html]

<img src="http://placehold.it/350x150" />

[/html]

Lorem Pixel

This service provides actual images that have been categorized for you so that you can display placeholder images that match the theme of your website e.g.

[html]
<img src="http://lorempixel.com/400/200/sports/"  />
[/html]

flickholdr

This is quite a clever image placeholder service as it sources images from flickr based on tags. This makes it a great option for pulling in images that are related to your site e.g.

[html]
<img src="http://flickholdr.com/200/300/sea,sun"  />
[/html]

Dummy Image Generator

This one is very customizable as you can change the colour, add text and even change the image file format. It doesn’t look the best but it has great functionality e.g.

[html]
<img src="http://dummyimage.com/600x400/000/fff"  />
[/html]

Place Kitten

Definitely the cutest image placeholder service. Lot’s of kittens are ready to be used as placeholder images in your designs or code e.g.

[html]
<img src="http://placekitten.com/200/300"  />
[/html]

Dummy Src

This dummy image generator allows the image size, format and colour to be customised along with the text colour e.g.

[html]
<img src="http://www.dummysrc.com/300x250.png/fc157e/17202A" />
[/html]

Do you know of any others? Be sure to include them in the comments below.