📡 Is picsum.photos down right now? We check it (and 37 other classic public mock/placeholder APIs) with a plain GET every 30 minutes — see the live status page or subscribe to its outage Atom feed. This guide was written during a real picsum outage; the status page always shows current reality.
picsum.photos is down — placeholder images that still work
Lorem Picsum is the placeholder service everyone actually likes: real photographs, a lovely URL API (picsum.photos/200/300), seeded determinism, grayscale and blur. It's wired into countless portfolio sites, demo apps, design mockups, tutorials and test fixtures.
Prefer clicking to reading? Build your URL in the live playground → (every param below, with instant preview).
And right now it's hard down. Starting 21:30 UTC on August 30, 2026 (confirmed by our tracker's consecutive 30-minute checks), every URL pattern fails — verified live while writing this:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} in %{time_total}s\n" --max-time 12 https://picsum.photos/200/300
# → 000 in 12.0s (connection hangs until timeout)
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://picsum.photos/seed/abc/200
# → 503
# /id/237/200/300 → timeout · /v2/list → timeout
# even the CDN host fastly.picsum.photos → 503When a placeholder host dies, the failure is ugly: broken-image icons across your demo, hanging requests that slow the whole page load (a 12-second stall per <img> in this outage), and CI screenshots full of alt text. Here are replacements that work today — including the one this site runs itself.
The 10-second replacement
Mockbird serves deterministic SVG placeholders from its shared demo project — no signup, no key, CORS on. Picsum's URL shapes work as-is (/200/300, /seed/abc/200/300), so the swap is a prefix replace:
# drop-in: replace the picsum host with the demo /img base — paths unchanged
grep -rl 'picsum.photos' src/ | xargs sed -i \
's#https://picsum.photos#https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img#g'Or write the URLs directly:
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/200x300">
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/200x300?seed=abc"> <!-- seeded, like /seed/abc/ -->
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/128?round=1&text=AL"> <!-- avatar -->
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/640x360?text=Hero&bg=1e3a8a">Live, rendered right here:
Any size from 1 to 2000 px, square shorthand (/img/300), served with Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400. And it's genuinely deterministic — the same URL yields byte-identical output, which your snapshot tests will appreciate:
curl -s "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/200x300?seed=abc" | md5sum
curl -s "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/200x300?seed=abc" | md5sum
# → identical hashesLorem Picsum URL → Mockbird translation
| On picsum.photos | On Mockbird |
|---|---|
/200/300 — width/height | /m/demo/img/200/300 — same path; /m/demo/img/200x300 works too |
/200 — square | /m/demo/img/200 — same path |
/seed/foo/200/300 — deterministic per seed | /m/demo/img/seed/foo/200/300 — same path, deterministic palette pick per seed (?seed=foo also works) |
/id/237/200/300 — a specific photo | no equivalent — there is no photo catalogue here (see below) |
?grayscale, ?blur=5 | same params — ?grayscale (bare flag) and ?blur=1-10 (bare ?blur = 5), on SVG and PNG output alike, deterministic like everything else. Handy for testing blur-up lazy-load placeholders |
.jpg / .webp raster output | .png and .jpg path suffixes (or ?format=png) return PNG bytes — same layout and determinism as the SVG. No JPEG/WebP encoding; if you specifically need those, placehold.co does JPEG/WebP/AVIF |
/v2/list — catalogue JSON | the whole rest of Mockbird — a mock REST API whose seeded records come with image URLs attached |
| — | ?text=Hello, ?round=1 avatars, ?bg=/&fg= hex colors — things picsum doesn't do |
Why placeholders at your mock API's base URL
Placeholder images are rarely the whole job. Usually you're building a UI against a backend that doesn't exist yet — and the fake products need fake photos, the fake users need fake avatars. Every Mockbird project (created anonymously with one curl) gets its own /img endpoint, and seeded image/avatar fields point at it automatically:
curl -s https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/products/1 | python3 -m json.tool
# "image": "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/640x480?seed=…"One base URL for data and images means one thing to swap when the real backend lands, no third-party host in your CI's critical path, and no 12-second image stalls when someone else's service has a bad night. The full placeholder-image guide covers every parameter; this link creates a seeded e-commerce backend — products with working image URLs — in one click, no signup.
Honest comparison — including where picsum wins
| picsum.photos | loremflickr | placehold.co | Mockbird /img | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real photographs | ✔ (its whole charm) | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ — flat SVG + text |
| Up right now (verified Aug 31, 2026) | ✘ — 503/timeouts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ (we track them all live) |
| Deterministic by URL | ✔ via /seed/ | ✘ (random per request) | ✔ | ✔ (byte-identical) |
| Grayscale / blur | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ — same ?grayscale/?blur params |
| Raster formats | ✔ jpg/webp | ✔ | ✔ PNG/JPEG/WebP/AVIF | ✔ PNG (.png/.jpg suffix or ?format=png); SVG default |
| Avatars / initials | ✘ | ✘ | partial (text) | ✔ ?round=1&text=AL |
| Comes with a mock data API | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ — same base URL |
| Signup | none | none | none | none |
Written by the Mockbird maker — bias disclosed. When picsum is up, its real photographs look far better than our flat SVGs in any read-only photo grid — use it there, it's a genuinely great service, and it's open source (DMarby/picsum-photos on GitHub) so you can self-host it if your build must never depend on someone else's uptime. LoremFlickr also serves real photos and answered today. DiceBear has far prettier avatar art than our initials-on-a-circle. Outage facts above verified by direct request on August 31, 2026 during the incident; the live status page (checked every 30 minutes) always shows whether they still hold.
Full API reference in the docs. More guides: free placeholder image API · lorempixel / placeimg alternative · fake e-commerce API · testing loading & error states. Create your API →