As a developer or a designer, it can be easy to get caught in the habit of trying to make things perfect.
Something as simple as choosing an image to insert in your website design/development can take up a lot of your time because you’re unsure of what to pick.
To help with this habit, there exist placeholder image generator tools. Not only does it automatically insert images for you, but it also saves you a lot of time in the process.
If this sounds like something you’d want to use, then we will look at some of the best tools that help you instantly generate placeholders.
What is a Placeholder Image Generator, and How can it help you?
If you’re a developer or designer or do anything that involves showcasing your work creatively, then a placeholder image generator can help you massively.
It’s a tool that automatically generates images for you at the desired dimensions to insert in your mockups, be it a website, app, or any other project.
It helps you showcase the project in a better way and draws more attention to it, rather than keeping the image areas empty.
As a developer, it can particularly help you:
- Save time
- Enhance the website mockup
- Better visualize the finished product
You can think of placeholder image generators as lorem ipsum, but for images. It saves you time by helping you skip the process of manually going to stock image websites, picking suitable images, setting the right dimensions, and then inserting them one by one on the website.
Also read: Best Productivity Apps for Programmers/Developers
By using the placeholder image generator tools, all you need to do is enter a few details to set your preferences, after which the tool will provide you a link to insert on your website. Once you do that, you’ll instantly notice that all the image areas will be filled with random images. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Below are the best placeholder image generators that you can use to get the job done with ease.
Dummy Image
Plain, simple, and effective is what best describes Dummy Image. It allows you to enter background color, foreground color, and size, as well as format and text to help you generate images as per your preference.
This is a great site for when you want to generate plain images with simple text rather than visually-appealing ones.
Dummy Image is free to use as many times as you wish.
LoremFlickr
You can generate placeholder images for any purpose and size with LoremFlickr. It’s simple and free; you only need to insert the generated URL into your code.
You can expect to get visually-stunning images straight from Flickr (as the name suggests), and all of them have a Creative Commons license, so you can be sure it won’t put you in any trouble.
As a free user, you get 10,000 credits to use. For anything more than that, you can look at their pro version.
Lorem Picsum
Lorem Picsum is the proper image version of lorem ipsum. It serves the same purpose: to generate placeholders, but this one is for images.
It automatically generates stylish and beautiful images for your website when you insert the link. You can set your preferences like size, effects, and more.
You can also choose to generate a specific image of your choice or turn them into a grayscale.
Placeholder
If you want to add lightweight images that do not burden your developed project, then Placeholder is your best bet. All their generated images are served as sub-kilobyte and are fully optimized.
You can choose your desired colors and size to fit on the website the way you want. Also, it allows you to set a short label for the images to keep track of what goes where in the code.
Placebear
Do you like bears? I really do, and this is why I am glad a site like Placebear exists. It provides images of bears as placeholders for your design or code.
It lets you choose the dimensions and image format. Instead of generating the link, it asks you to create it yourself, which is still easy.
All you do is enter the dimensions after their URL and then insert it in your code.
Placeholder Image Generator
Another tool that only generates plain and simple images, Placeholder Image Generator, is useful when you’re short on time and don’t need anything fancy.
It allows you to set your preferences, such as:
- Width
- Height
- Text Color
- Background color
- Caption
- Font
- Format
Once you set the preferences, it generates a link to copy and paste. The whole process takes no more than a few seconds.
Lorem.space
A hub for high-quality and attractive images, Lorem.space is a great option you can consider for your placeholder images. It can choose from several categories: food, car, movie posters, face, fashion, and more.
For a tool that is so useful, it’s sad to know that it’ll be closing the site soon. However, you can still use it if you run the open-source script on your own server.
Fakeimg.pl
Totally free and open-source, Fakeimg.pl is an easy-to-use placeholder image generator that comes with several customization options.
It allows you to set your own color, size, and text. A very interesting feature is that it also supports Japanese, Korean, and Chinese texts.
At the moment, Fakeimg.pl only allows you to generate plain images. Also, you’d have to create the link by adding your preferred parameters.
PlaceIMG
PlaceIMG has served hundreds of images so far and has been a great tool for many users. It lets you select categories, set filters, choose dimensions and basically customize it as per your own requirement.
It generates a link automatically for you to insert into your code. All images are safe to use in your projects, so you don’t have to stress about infringing the rights.
PlaceIMG is free to use.
Author’s Note
Creating a project is already time-consuming and takes a lot of effort. I believe after all that hard work, you deserve to get a few things easily, and the above placeholder image generators are exactly that.
It makes your “showcasing” task much easier and faster than doing it manually.
Next, check out these amazing tools to create mockups for your projects.
