Yeah, they seem to be static images stored on the server, rather than generated dynamically via, say, Google Search. Personally I would have gone via that route. Have the word "kitten" and the pixel size as parameters, and serve a random photo out of the first 50 results.
This would mean no caching, so your computer would have to download the image every time, even if it was the same as one you'd already seen.
Unless you're only using these images for client demos, it can be very slow and frustrating waiting for them to load every time you refresh while trying to do html, css or js tweaks.
I fail to see any problems with hotlinking to random images hosted at a site that you don't control from a webpage that you're probably going to demo to your boss or client.
I use this quite often when I'm mocking up a design and I want it to have kind of realism. I've recently discovered http://placehold.it/ which is pretty cool as well
Alternatively, if you're just looking for a way to put placeholders on a page, image services and javascript solutions seem like overkill. You can achieve the same thing with a bit of css:
~100k images sent so far today at ~10kB per image is one GB of traffic, which costs less than a dime. Assuming usage goes up to twice this by the end of the day, that's ~$6/mo.
It would be nice if it was possible to supply a seed for the randomization algorithm. Then the image wouldn't change at every reload and it's still possible to get another one if it's desired.
I imagine it would be a bit annoying if the image changed every time I reloaded the page which I do quite a lot while developing a web page. If I were to show a page I've developed to a customer I would not like to have to explain why the images are changing all the time.
This is a great idea! Although I'd prefer if the generation form was the center of attention in that page. On my 14" MacBook display I had to scroll down to see it.
Reminds me of an unicode lorem ipsum I came across some time ago which I forgot the name of. Anyone know it?
Great idea. Could you please put a button that will cause the size sliders to obey common sizes? I tried to do 1280x1024 and I basically had to use the up/down arrows to zoom in on each one.
On top of the obvious (resize to largest dimension, crop smallest) I'm guessing they set an anchor point on the image rather than use the center.
For example, the pig's face isn't centered. So rather than returning the center of the image, they crop the sides proportionally to the anchor point on the pig's face.
Edit: Nup. They just crop it down the middle. If you're the developer feel free to steal the above.
I would guess they pull from the wiki commons and then use typical JPG or PNG algorithm libraries to stretch or compress the image. There's probably some AI to retrieve images that don't need to be stretched much so that it looks natural.
> The provided images are for layout purposes and each image we use for this project is released under the creative commons license (CC BY-SA). For more information visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
So, if you want to use the images for more than just layouts, you have to double check the license and ask the author. For this we will link to each photographer's flickr page. Furthermore, we assume no liability.
