Image Placeholder and Lorem Ipsum Generators

In development or design, there comes a point where text and images are needed. Anyone who has received all the necessary visual material by this stage can count themselves lucky. Often, wishful thinking prevails, and one has to make do with classic Lorem Ipsum texts and images from a personal archive. However, there are alternatives to bring more life into designs beyond this traditional approach.

The Classics

Everyone knows the most wanted image placeholder generators: Placehold.it and Lorempixel. Here you'll find classic boxes, options for text inserts, and various image categories. Additionally, these services offer output in GIF, JPG, and PNG formats.

For dummy texts, I mainly use the Lorem Ipsum Generator on generator.lorem-ipsum.info. Besides classic texts, it offers various foreign languages, such as Chinese or Greek, and goodies in the form of constructed languages or Morse code. Nobody really needs these quickly, I just enjoy playing around with them. Text output is available as plain text or HTML. There's also the option to specify the number of words and paragraphs. Diacritics are also available for selection.

Even More Placeholder Generators

If you want to see Charlie Sheen or other silver screen heroes countless times on your site, you'll find them, just like bears or apes. Of course, variants with actors and singers are also very popular. From Vanilla Ice to Nicolas Cage, everything is available. The latter even offers a small extra feature: the Crazy Cage Images. Why someone came up with the idea of offering meat in all possible forms as an image placeholder service remains a mystery to me. Speaking of meat, there's a fitting Bacon Ipsum Generator.

Cats always work on the web. Therefore, it's essential to offer cat and dog fans image placeholder generators. Lovers can stock up on Place Kitten and Place Puppy. To prevent the kittens on your site from dying lonely, all you need is the Kitty Ipsum text – extra fluffy, of course!

A superb idea is definitely Flickholdr. However, the latency on the website for this image placeholder service is very problematic, making a quick retrieval of images impossible. What a shame, who wouldn't have wanted to tap into the Flickverse for their own project? The comments, however, promise hope.

Unusual Alternatives

To move from the endless alternatives to my favourites, you need to know my passions: food, films, and the web. Picksum Ipsum provides some of the most iconic quotes from Hollywood stars. I satisfy my cheese fetish with Cheese Ipsum and my passion for the web with Web 2.0 Ipsum. None of this compares to my superhero from my youth – Chuck Norris! Well, that's a half-truth; the hero of my youth is MacGyver. He silently defuses atomic bombs or cobbles them together from chewing gum and a bobby pin. Thus, he's out of the running for a dummy text generator.

Drupal and WordPress Developer Tools

For all WordPress developers, the Lorem Shortcode Plugin is available. As the name suggests, this generator provides Lorem Ipsum texts or image placeholders with a simple command. Holder.js is another option for developers who prefer to do without cats and holiday photos. This tool allows you to define your own themes or enter texts and can be found on Github.

And finally, there's the practical Drupal module for Devel. Drupal developers know and appreciate Devel, which, in addition to its main task, also generates Lorem Ipsum texts for the local site on command. The Devel images provider for Drupal generates dummy images from various sources. What's great about this placeholder module? It works automatically with most of the services mentioned above. Choose a provider, and kittens, zombies, Flickr photos, and much more will adorn your new site.

A quick postscript for all beer lovers: Beerhold.it and Bavaria Ipsum! With the former, it's less about beer than the people in the pictures, and with the latter, there's a grumpy mode.

What are your favourites, or do you prefer to stick to the classic Lorem Ipsum variant or images from your personal archive?