picsumphotos

Picsum Photos is a web service that provides placeholder images for web and app development. Hosted at picsum.photos, it offers a rotating pool of photographs suitable for testing layouts, graphics, and UI components. The service is widely used to fill spaces during design and development without relying on proprietary assets.

The core feature set centers on a simple, URL-based API. Requests specify desired width and height, returning an image that matches those dimensions, for example, https://picsum.photos/200/300. Users can obtain deterministic results by using a seed, such as https://picsum.photos/seed/pic2/200/300, which returns the same image for that seed. Specific images can be retrieved by ID, e.g., https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/300. A separate endpoint provides a JSON list of images and metadata, available at https://picsum.photos/v2/list (with pagination and limits).

Optional visual variations include blur and grayscale through query parameters, such as https://picsum.photos/200/300?blur=5 or https://picsum.photos/200/300?grayscale. The service also supports a list of images with details like author, width, height, and source URLs, useful for programmatic selection or cataloging. All images are served in a lightweight, cached manner and require no authentication.

Licensing and attribution terms are provided by the site; users should consult the official pages for usage rights and credits. Picsum Photos is primarily used for mockups, prototypes, and testing purposes in development workflows.