Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#1

Post by dmarby » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos
picsum.photos

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#2

Post by berbec » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

Normally, I don't think much of the name of a product. Descriptive, flowerly, pie-in-the-sky, complete bs, etc.

This one is genius.

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#3

Post by uberman » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

How does this service distinguish itself from any of the other image placeholder services out there?

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#4

Post by gloflo » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

What is your privacy policy? Do you store any information about the users?

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#5

Post by dmarby » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

gloflo wrote: post #4

What is your privacy policy? Do you store any information about the users?

There's Google Analytics on the website. For the API/service, there's no user/usage information being stored, other than aggregated bandwidth/total requests for the entire service, by our CDN provider, BelugaCDN. You can find the source code, as well as the deployment setup here: https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#6

Post by an4rchy » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

Great name! Also, seems like a nifty, simple and useful service for quick prototyping.

This seems like a bandwidth heavy service. I am curious to hear how you are thinking about managing/scaling this.

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#7

Post by amanzi » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

uberman wrote: post #3

How does this service distinguish itself from any of the other image placeholder services out there?

I haven't seen any other image placeholder services that look similar to this. Can you share some examples?

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#8

Post by dmarby » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

an4rchy wrote: post #6

Great name! Also, seems like a nifty, simple and useful service for quick prototyping. This seems like a bandwidth heavy service. I am curious to hear how you are thinking about managing/scaling this.

The service has actually been around since about 2014, currently, we serve about 400 million images a month, using some 6TB of bandwidth. It's pretty manageable since we use a CDN on top of the service, to cache already processed images.

Hoping to do a write-up of the architecture in the future, but the source and deployment setup is available at https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos if you're interested

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#9

Post by olalonde » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

berbec wrote: post #2

Normally, I don't think much of the name of a product. Descriptive, flowerly, pie-in-the-sky, complete bs, etc. This one is genius.

I strongly suspect the name came first.

Re: Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos

#10

Post by pvorb » Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

This looks neat and might come in handy. I'm concerned about the legitimation, though.

Citing from https://unsplash.com/license:

> This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.

I'd argue this is exactly the type of "similar or competing service" that is meant by this sentence.

Edit: Did Unsplash give their consent?