Lorem Picsum vs PhotoRoom

Lorem Picsum serves placeholder photos by encoding the size, and optionally a specific image ID or a seed, directly into the request URL — no signup or key required. Every photo comes from Unsplash's library, and query parameters can request a grayscale or blurred variant, a JPEG or WebP file extension, or a random cache-busting suffix for multiple images at one size. A companion /v2/list JSON endpoint returns the full photo catalog with author and dimension metadata for browsing before you hotlink.

PhotoRoom's API takes a product or portrait photo and returns a background-removed, background-generated, or otherwise edited image via a single multipart POST, authenticated with an x-api-key header per its docs at docs.photoroom.com — a separate GitBook site from the marketing homepage. A live CORS preflight against its segmentation endpoint reflected two different arbitrary Origin headers back with credentials enabled, so browser-side calls are supported directly. New accounts get a 1,000-image sandbox allowance for testing plus limited free production calls to the Remove Background endpoint, with paid plans covering higher volume and the full Image Editing API.