Placeholder kitten image service. A community staple from the 2010s used alongside placehold.it for design comps, prototype layouts, and demos.
APIs.yml: apis.yml
As of 2026-05-30, https://placekitten.com/ (and /{width}/{height}, /g/{width}/{height}) returns Cloudflare HTTP 521 ("Web server is down"). DNS still resolves to Cloudflare edge IPs, but the origin is unreachable. Treat the service as defunct.
Recommended alternatives: picsum.photos, placedog.net, place-hold.it, or self-hosted assets.
- x-type: opensource (community placeholder service)
- x-tier: 3 (bulk-registered from public-apis)
- x-status: deprecated
- source: public-apis/public-apis — category: Animals
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
/{width}/{height} |
Color kitten JPEG at requested size |
/g/{width}/{height} |
Grayscale kitten JPEG at requested size |
Example: https://placekitten.com/200/300, https://placekitten.com/g/400/600
| Artifact | Path |
|---|---|
| OpenAPI 3.0 spec | openapi/placekitten-openapi.yml |
| JSON Schema — request | json-schema/placekitten-image-request-schema.json |
| JSON Schema — response | json-schema/placekitten-image-response-schema.json |
| JSON Structure | json-structure/placekitten-image-request-structure.json |
| JSON-LD context | json-ld/placekitten-context.jsonld |
| Spectral ruleset | rules/placekitten-rules.yml |
| Shared capability | capabilities/shared/placekitten.yaml |
| Workflow capability | capabilities/fetch-placeholder-image.yaml |
| Vocabulary | vocabulary/placekitten-vocabulary.yml |
| Examples | examples/ (3 files) |
Animals, Public APIs, Placeholder, Images, Deprecated
- Original author: Mark James (http://mark.james.name), inspired by
placehold.it. - There is no canonical PlaceKitten GitHub organization or first-party SDK; the GitHub ecosystem only contains third-party language wrappers (Ruby, Django, jQuery, Angular, Swift, PHP, Python, etc.).
- Free, no authentication, no documented rate limits — pricing/rate-limits/finops profiling intentionally skipped per opensource defunct-service pipeline.
- Original entry bulk-registered as part of a public-apis catalog sweep on 2026-05-28; full enrichment pipeline run on 2026-05-30 confirmed defunct status.
- Created: 2026-05-28
- Modified: 2026-05-30
- Kin Lane — kin@apievangelist.com