Free placeholder image API — the classic hosts are dead, here's one that isn't

An uncomfortable number of the placeholder-image URLs baked into a decade of tutorials, starter templates, and Stack Overflow answers no longer work. Checked live, July 2026:

Host	Status today
`via.placeholder.com`	❌ dead — connection accepted, request hangs, no response
`placehold.it`	❌ dead for images — serves a Cloudflare human-verification challenge; an `<img>` tag can't solve one
`placekitten.com`	❌ dead — HTTP 521 (origin down) — dedicated placekitten guide (incl. where to get actual cats)
`placeimg.com`	❌ dead — shut down, domain no longer resolves — replacement table
`lorempixel.com`	❌ dead — HTTP 429 "Site Unavailable" on every path (verified Sep 2026) — dedicated lorempixel guide (category-photo replacements incl.)
`picsum.photos`	usually up, but has real outages (hard down Aug 30–31, 2026 — see the picsum-alternative guide) — live status
`placehold.co`, `dummyimage.com`, `loremflickr.com`	usually up — live status: placehold.co · dummyimage · loremflickr
`dicebear`, `ui-avatars`	✅ alive and fine — see the honest comparison below

If a grey rectangle in your project stopped rendering, that's why. Here's a replacement URL that takes ten seconds — and if you're mocking an API anyway, a reason the placeholder should live next to your mock data.

The 10-second fix

<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/300x200">
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/128?round=1&text=AL&seed=ada">   <!-- avatar -->
<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/640x360?text=Hero+banner&bg=1e3a8a">

Those three, rendered live right here (fetched from the API as you read this): 300×200 placeholder Round avatar with initials AL

Build your URL — live playground

width height text

bg fg seed round (avatar)

The preview above is the real API — every keystroke re-renders from /m/demo/img. Paste the URL into an <img src> and you're done. Want the full builder with ?grayscale, ?blur, PNG output and avatar styles? Open the standalone playground →

No signup, no key. demo is Mockbird's shared public playground project; every Mockbird project (including ones you create anonymously with one curl) gets the same /img endpoint under its own URL. Output is a crisp SVG at any size from 1 to 2000 px, served with Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400 and CORS *.

Parameters

Param	Does	Example
`/img/WxH`	size (1–2000). `/img/300` = square shorthand; picsum.photos-shaped paths work as-is: `/img/300/200`, `/img/seed/abc/300/200`	`/img/640x480`, `/img/300`, `/img/300/200`
`?text=`	label, ≤64 chars (default "W×H"). Font auto-scales to fit	`?text=Product+7`
`?bg=` / `?fg=`	3- or 6-digit hex, no `#`. Custom `bg` alone auto-picks a readable text color	`?bg=1e3a8a&fg=fff`
`?seed=`	any string → deterministic palette color (same seed, same color, forever)	`?seed=ada`
`?round=1`	circle instead of rectangle — avatars	`?round=1&text=AL`
`?grayscale`	desaturate (picsum-compatible bare flag; `?greyscale` works too)	`/img/400x300?grayscale`
`?blur=1-10`	gaussian blur, picsum-compatible (bare `?blur` = 5) — test blur-up lazy-load placeholders. Works on SVG and PNG output (PNG capped at 512×512)	`/img/40x30.png?blur=5`

Everything is deterministic: the same URL always renders the exact same bytes. That matters for visual-regression tests — no cache-busting randomness, no flaky screenshot diffs.

The actual point: your mock data ships with images that render

Placeholder images are rarely the whole job — usually you're building a UI against an API that doesn't exist yet, and the fake product objects need fake photos and the fake users need fake avatars. Mockbird is a hosted mock REST API, and its seeded image and avatar fields point at the project's own /img endpoint automatically:

curl 'https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/products/1?select=name,image'
# {
#   "id": 1,
#   "name": "Thing City Time",
#   "image": "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/img/640x480?seed=6534"
# }

So one curl creates a project with 30 products whose image URLs already work, and user-type resources seed circular avatars with the person's initials. Your product grid, your account dropdown, your review list — everything renders on first load, and none of it makes a request to a third-party image service that might be the next via.placeholder.com:

curl -s -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"preset":"ecommerce"}'
# → { "id": "abc123xyz0", ... }  — full fake store: data + images, one origin

Prefer clicking: create the same project in one click.

Why same-origin placeholders are worth caring about

One dependency instead of two. Your demo/CI/portfolio project depends on one host, not "my mock API + whichever image service still exists".
Deterministic tests. Same URL, same bytes — screenshot tests don't flake because a random kitten changed.
No surprise rate limits. Usage counts toward your project's own quota (10,000 requests/day per project; the shared demo gets 50,000) — nothing else throttles you.
Works in protected mode. If you lock a project behind mock JWT auth, /img deliberately stays open, because <img> tags can't send Authorization headers.

Honest comparison

	placehold.co	dummyimage	picsum / loremflickr	dicebear / ui-avatars	Mockbird /img
Alive (July 2026)	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Formats	SVG, PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF	PNG, GIF, JPG	JPEG/WebP real photos	SVG/PNG avatars	SVG + PNG (`.png` suffix / `?format=png`)
Custom text / colors	✅ + custom fonts	✅	—	initials/art styles	✅ text, colors, seed palette
Avatars (initials, circle)	—	—	—	✅ (their specialty)	✅
Real photos	—	—	✅	—	—
Same origin as your mock API	—	—	—	—	✅ — seeded data pre-wired

Written by the Mockbird maker — bias disclosed. Where the survivors genuinely win: placehold.co does more raster formats (JPEG/WebP/AVIF), retina variants, and custom fonts — if you need those, use it, it's excellent (Mockbird covers PNG, at up to 1000×1000). picsum.photos and loremflickr serve real photographs, which look far better in a read-only portfolio grid. DiceBear has genuinely charming avatar art styles; ours are plain initials-on-a-circle. Mockbird's /img is SVG (any size up to 2000 px) or PNG (up to 1,000,000 pixels — PNG guide). Use it when the placeholder should live at the same base URL as the rest of your fake backend — which, if you're mocking an API at all, is most of the time. Dead-host statuses verified by direct request on July 28, 2026, and the surviving hosts are tracked live (checked every 30 minutes) — the links in the table above always show current reality.

FAQ

Is via.placeholder.com coming back? Unknown — it has been intermittently down for long stretches and currently doesn't answer requests at all. Treat URLs pointing at it as broken and swap the host.

Do I need to create anything to use the images? No — /m/demo/img/… works bare. Create your own project (one curl, no signup) if you want your own namespace, your own quota, and seeded data around it.

SVG in an <img> tag — anything to watch for? It renders in every modern browser exactly like a PNG would. The response carries X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff and a restrictive Content-Security-Policy, and text is XML-escaped — it's an image, not an injection vector.

Full parameter reference in the docs. More guides: fake user API with avatars · fake ecommerce API · mock API for React · free mock API tools compared. Create your API →