Placeholder Image URL Builder
Build a Lorem Picsum URL with custom size, seed, blur and grayscale.
Quick answer: Placeholder Image URL Builder: build a Lorem Picsum URL with custom size, seed, blur and grayscale. Runs entirely in your browser, free, no signup.
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During design and prototyping you constantly need images that do not exist yet, and hard-coding gray boxes is tedious. This builder assembles a Lorem Picsum URL — a free, community-donated photo CDN — so you can drop a real, correctly sized photograph into any mockup just by pasting a link, with no files to host and no copyright to worry about for throwaway comps.
The feature that makes it genuinely useful for development is the seed. Passing the same seed string always returns the same photo at a given size, which means a placeholder stays stable across page reloads and looks identical to everyone reviewing the design — no more shuffling image every refresh. Change the seed and you get a different but equally deterministic picture, so you can populate a whole grid with varied, repeatable content.
Blur and grayscale flags are handy for testing how a layout behaves behind text overlays or in a muted state, and any dimension from 1×1 up to 5000×5000 is fair game. Remember these URLs pull from an external CDN at render time, so they are perfect for prototypes but should be swapped for real, self-hosted assets before production. When you do have final artwork, size it down with the image resizer or generate icons with the favicon generator.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the URL builder free?
- Yes — free, no signup.
- Where do the images come from?
- Lorem Picsum (picsum.photos) — a free, donated photo CDN. Stable URLs forever.
- Are the same seeds always the same image?
- Yes — that's why seeds exist. Pick a seed and the image will be identical on every render.
- What sizes are allowed?
- Anything from 1×1 up to 5000×5000 pixels.
- Is anything uploaded?
- No — only the URL builder runs locally; the preview loads from Lorem Picsum's CDN.