Dynamically Create Dummy Images At Any Size

Over the weekend I worked on a little micro project to help me during web development work. Have you ever needed a dummy image while laying out a site but opening a graphics app, entering the dimensions, saving it out, and uploading said image to your server seemed like too much work? Yea it was a bother for me to.

That’s why I created DummyImage.com which let’s you spit out a filler image at any size you want. All you have to do is construct a URL like so http://dummyimage.com/300×240. Replace the numbers with whatever you want and my script will spit back a GIF image for you.

300×240 Dummy Image from DummyImage.com

I have even packaged up the source code so you can download it, run it on your own server, mash it to bits or whatever else you want. Comments, suggestions, improvements are always welcome and hopefully this thing won’t take down my server from all of the image generating on the back end.

Happy Dummy Imaging!

8 Responses to “ Dynamically Create Dummy Images At Any Size ”

  1. Awesome. Could definitely come in handy Thanks!

    Reply

  2. Hey, what a neat little tool. I hadn’t ever wished for something like this but it might be one of those things you don’t know you need until you see it.

    Reply

  3. Huh!.. i just found your site. I created a random image generator myself for exactly the same reason, for helping me in web development. Feel free to check it out at rndimg.com

    Reply

    Russell Heimlich responded on September 10th, 2009:

    Yea but you can’t change your image from a url… IE http://dummyimage.com/400×600 and http://dummyimage.com/100×900

    I made this to avoid having to gernate images, save them, and upload them somewhere when doing mockups. I’ve got more ideas for this tool but no time to implement them yet.

    Nice ideas with the styles!

    Dan responded on September 16th, 2009:

    Hehe yeah i know, thats a great idea with the / dimensions. Would you mind if i borowed the idea and implemeted it on my own site ?

    Russell Heimlich responded on September 16th, 2009:

    Sure go for it. The source code is there for the taking though it is in PHP. Should be fairly straightforward but let me know if you have any questions. http://www.russellheimlich.com/contact

  4. A bit on the late side spotting this, but what a great little tool. Thanks for sharing it with us.

    Reply

  5. […] quite comfortable with JavaScript however and found PHP easy to pickup. On August 26th, 2007, I had launched my first version of dummyimage.com.The first release was as simple as could be. The only thing you could change were the dimensions of […]

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