Show HN: CC0 Avatar placeholder service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CC0 Avatar placeholder service

pravatar.cc

85 pointsasika3276426 comments

Could be useful to have an option to specify adult/child/all ages. I mean, I know they're placeholders. But it would seem odd to see children in our staging app since I don't think many children are involved in B2B sales.

It would also be nice if there were an option to specify male or female. I could see this being useful for randomly generating some users for prototypes and it would be nice if it were possible to have the name more consistent with the photo.

that was my first thought, too.

Really nice tool, though!

Also race if you are using it for certain markets.

And perhaps setting (casual/business).

Also probabilities:

&malepc=50&childrenpc=05

CC0 is a Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

The effect is just to put something in the public domain. It's not like the other licenses.

Right.

The key thing is that the “Public Domain”, and dedication thereto, doesn't exist in all countries, or at least, it doesn't always function the same way as it does in the U.S. So CC0 tries to get as close as possible in such countries, by waiving all applicable rights and so on, or if that's not possible, giving a very liberal license grant.

It looks a bit like a joke project. There's only 70 images no possibility of filter (age / gender / face - non-face ) etc. It's a good idea but I imagine anyone who would find it useful already has more a more complete version they made themselves! Personally I have over 20,000 avatar images I scraped from various sites I use in prototyping.

Cool.

This is a "Lorem Ipsum" for avatars, article bylines, etc.

Maybe it also could be useful if the images could have a random name or username.

So, in the same manner as with the avatars, using the same id, the same name/username would be returned each time.

Such a pity that https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/1y2k1dtp/ brings the same picture 5 times (cache and all of that). Maybe it could be added to the homepage a small explanation about why this works as expected: https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/L52as3z8/

Also, check out http://chancejs.com/ , maybe you can integrate it there for random content generation (:

Pretty much every image placeholder service I've used does that.

Well that is pretty much my point, to try to differentiate (;

Your second link has a (cache busting) query string.

Nice! I love the unique ID option. Makes it easy to give some fake users for prototypes a consistent identity.

It would be cool if there was a way to submit your own. I'd gladly contribute a silly picture under CC0 for the greater good of mockups.

Neat! I like how you can get the same placeholder by referencing its ID.

Already trying it out on my project http://beta.raspchat.com/ seems like its slow some times and ?d= parameter causes cache busting causing image to be downloaded everytime I open it up

Not everybody uses a photo of a face for an avatar. :)

What does that have to do with placeholders? Lorem Ipsum doesn't accurately represent all the types of things people write.

No, but the point of Lorem Ipsum is it blends into the page reasonably, real text or not. If you were writing e.g. a template for a piece of forum software which doesn't use real names, the vast majority of people use avatars that are not pictures of faces, and if you wound up designing around face pictures (bright, certain colour tones, etc etc), your design might clash slightly with what people actually use.

Well then you wouldn't use this project, would you? I wouldn't use a phone book for a user directory, but I also wouldn't suggest the phone company has failed by not releasing a book consisting solely of my employees' details.

In which case you might use something more like https://robohash.org/ (which was just the first off top of my head).

There are a number of convert a hash to some stylized avatar tools out there already. I've seen fewer examples like Pravatar with actual headshot photos for design use.

Right, which is why designers in fact often turn to placeholder text closer to English (or their language).

I only felt like pointing that out.

Even with the emoticon, that comment seemed designed to put down the project by suggesting its author is shortsighted and has failed to see how things really work in the really real world.

Was it your intent to condescend and hope it goes unnoticed by the addition of a few bits of punctuation? To belittle the work that went into it? Because, to be frank with you, that's how it seemed to me.

All I can say is it absolutely wasn't my intent to belittle the work that went into the project. I only felt like sharing what went through my mind when seeing that all of the avatars were faces.

There are many sites where faces are expected, like Facebook or LinkedIn. The internet is larger than that, though, and some people prefer to identify in other ways. Maybe I should've been more explicit about the conversation starter.

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