I know it's easy to be negative about kittens because of the whole lol cats thing, but a service which provides free, sizable, placeholder images that are more than just gray boxes is actually pretty useful. Remember the days when people used to use "blah blah blah" for all of their text before the copy was in? Now we use Lorem Ipsum. These kittens may well be what we do for photographs in the future.

I agree. This (or a similar tool) is set to become a genuinely useful part of my web development toolkit.

If it used random CC images from flickr, rather than kittens, I wonder if there would be so much objection.

If you let the /b/tards' love of kittens forever bond the "kitten" symbol in your brain indelibly to the "idiocy" symbol, you are letting the /b/tards win. They are just mammals. (Kittens, not /b/tards.)

However, it probably doesn't warrant the #1 spot.

I was about to post the exact same thing. It would be cool if there was a service that pulled CC licensed photos from Flickr for this purpose and scaled them according to the user's wishes, pulling from an archive of photos based on aspect ratio, size, etc.

I would most definitely use a version of this that pulled random photos from Flickr. That's a brilliant idea. Would also give clients a much better view of a mockup than just the gray boxes, by seeing what a mixture of different coloured photos look like.

Agreed. This is something someone might find useful in a project they're working on. Unlike any Techcrunch or Gruber post.

If HN were my personal pet project, that would be my link litmus test. "Is this something that might be useful info for making something, and not just 'news' to jabber on about?"

Might be too restrictive at first blush, but that is what I come here for, not to read "news" stories that are posted everywhere else too.

I think that it is correct to question whether this should be the top submission though.

The advantage of Lorem Ipsum is that it has zero intrinsic appeal. It looks right, but doesn't distract from the overall.

Unless you're a bloody dog lover, you're going to be distracted by the rather cute kittens. The client is going to think, at first: "Ha ha. That's funny and cute." and then they're going to think, "What am I not seeing?"

There are a couple of other services which are more "client-suitable" and have a few more options:

* http://dummyimage.com/ * http://placehold.it/

The most useful thing to come out of this post for me is the knowledge of dummyimages.com, and specifically the aliases for the IAB standard ad sizes such as http://dummyimage.com/leaderboard/E/C. Great work by Russell Heimlich on that site, and the source code is MIT too if you want to run it locally.

Thanks I'm glad you like the ad sizes. My goal was to make it pretty hard to get a 404 while sticking to a format that's natural and easy to use. Originally dummyimage.com only had size parameters then peopel clamored for color and custom text thanks to another Hacker News post.

I've jotted down the brief history of how dummyimage.com got started for anyone interested as well http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/the-history-of-dummyimag...

I completely agree. I've been asking around recently for a decent source of imagery for placeholders, it's a stupid thing to spend time on every time I build a site where visuals are essential. This service is an interesting way of tackling the problem, and I think it's technologically interesting - and the image selection looks very high quality and professional compared to the random Flickr rips I was doing before.