The Perils of Placeholder Photo Services

It is said a picture can say a thousand words, so it's important that the right picture is in the right place. A sophisticated venue for example with a full cast of lions, zebras and the odd gorrilla for good measure writes a novel on all the wrong images in all the wrong places. Likewise, our clients may understandably be concerned their new website seems set on them having four hooves and a tail.

Unfortunately this is the risk when using such 'placeholder' tools, such as Lorem Pixel, before the content is available to us and where the control of the images is in someone else's hands. We’d always recommend that content is supplied to us before we start a website build but sometimes that’s not possible with imagery and adding grey boxes can be less than inspiring.

With this in mind, we decided to build our own placeholder service that we could fill with our own hand-picked images to provide a quick and easy way to mock-up image content on our in-development websites.

The technologies powering it include the lightweight, but flexible Lumen framework combined with the powerful image manipulation library, Intervention. But you don't need to take our word for it, as we have released it as Open Source Software - available for you to use, modify and contribute to absolutely free of charge!

You can find the source code on GitHub.