Photography & Design APIs
Free photography and design APIs: stock photo libraries, placeholder images, museum and art collections, icons, colour palettes and image manipulation services.
22 tested APIs with full docs · 22 need no key · 63 more listed
Tested, with full documentation
We called each of these before publishing. Every page carries a working curl command, the real JSON response it returned, parameters and common errors.
Art Institute of Chicago
Free Art Institute of Chicago API with no key: 130,000+ artworks with IIIF images, colour data, artist info and rich metadata. Well documented. Tested example.
Cleveland Museum of Art
Free Cleveland Museum of Art API with no key: 60,000+ artworks with open-access images, provenance, exhibition history and full metadata. Tested curl example.
ColorMagic
Free colour palette API with no key: search thousands of named palettes by keyword and get five hex codes, descriptive tags and a like count. Tested example included.
COLOURlovers
Free COLOURlovers API with no key: community-voted colour palettes, individual colours and patterns with hex values, view counts and popularity ranks. Tested example included.
DiceBear Avatars
Free avatar generator API with no key: deterministic SVG or PNG avatars from any seed, in 30+ styles with customisable colours. Tested curl example.
DummyImage
Free placeholder image API with no key: any size, custom background and text colours, custom caption, PNG, GIF or JPG — all from the URL. Tested example included.
Icon Horse
Free favicon API with no key: fetches the highest-quality icon for any domain and always returns something, generating a letter-mark fallback when a site has none. Tested example included.
Iconify
Free Iconify API with no key: fetch any icon from 200,000+ across 150 open-source sets as SVG, sized and recoloured from the URL. Tested example included.
Icons8 Image URLs
Free icon delivery by URL with no key: choose a style, size and icon name in the path and get a rendered PNG or SVG straight back. Tested example included.
LoremFlickr
Free placeholder photo service with no key: put dimensions and a keyword in the URL and get a matching real photograph from Flickr. Tested example included.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Free Metropolitan Museum of Art API with no key: 470,000+ artworks with high-resolution public-domain images, artist data and full object metadata. Tested.
Openverse
Free Openverse API: search 800M+ openly licensed images and audio from Flickr, Wikimedia and more, with licence and attribution data. WordPress-run. Tested.
PHP-Noise
Free noise background API with no key: generate subtle tiling noise texture PNGs in any colour with adjustable grain and blur, straight from a URL. Tested example included.
Placehold.co
Free placeholder image API with no key: generate images at any size with custom colours, text and format straight from a URL. No JSON needed. Tested example.
PlaceKeanu
Free novelty placeholder service with no key: dimensions in the path return a Keanu Reeves placeholder, with greyscale and young-Keanu variants. Tested example included.
Readme Typing SVG
Free animated SVG API with no key: generate a typing-and-deleting text animation from URL parameters, embeddable anywhere an image works. Tested example included.
RoboHash
Free RoboHash API with no key: unique robot, monster, cat or human avatars generated deterministically from any text. Just a URL, no JSON. Tested example.
SVGL
Free logo API with no key: hundreds of company and product logos as SVG, categorised, with separate wordmark variants and links to official brand kits. Tested example included.
Thum.io
Free website screenshot API with no key: put a page URL in the path and get a rendered PNG back, with width, viewport and full-page options. Tested example included.
UI Avatars
Free initials avatar API with no key: generate clean letter avatars from any name, with custom colours, size, shape and font weight. URL-based. Tested.
wsrv.nl (Images.weserv)
Free image proxy and resizing API with no key: fetch any public image through a URL, resize, crop, convert format and serve it from a CDN. Tested example included.
xColors
Free colour API with no key: generate random colours returned simultaneously as hex, RGB and HSL, or convert between the three formats. Tested example included.
Choosing between these Photography & Design APIs
Photography APIs split between stock libraries you can search programmatically and generative or placeholder services that produce images on demand. Museum and gallery APIs are a quieter third group with genuinely open, public-domain collections.
Licensing is the thing to check. 'Free API' and 'free to use the images commercially' are different claims, and most stock providers require visible attribution and a link back even on their free tier.
More Photography & Design APIs in the directory
63 further APIs in this category, of which 12 need no API key. These are catalogued from the public-API lists and link straight to each provider's own documentation — we have not tested them yet, so treat the auth and CORS flags as the upstream list's claim rather than ours. They are promoted to a full tested page as we work through them.
| API | What it does | Auth |
|---|---|---|
| Améthyste | Generate images for Discord users | Key |
| APITemplate.io | Dynamically generate images and PDFs from templates with a simple API | KeyCORS |
| Art Search | Search and discover art with semantic AI search | KeyCORS |
| Bruzu | Image generation with query string | KeyCORS |
| Change Image Background API | This API helps you change the background of any image | KeyCORS |
| CheetahO | Photo optimization and resize | Key |
| Colormind | Color scheme generator | None |
| Convert Images to PDF API | Convert any image to a PDF without losing quality with one API call | KeyCORS |
| Cooper Hewitt | Smithsonian Design Museum | Key |
| Dagpi | Image manipulation and processing | Key |
| DiceBear | Free avatar generation library with multiple styles | NoneCORS |
| Dribbble | Discover the world’s top designers & creatives | OAuth |
| Duply | Generate, Edit, Scale and Manage Images and Videos Smarter & Faster | KeyCORS |
| Duply | Generate, Edit, Scale and Manage Images and Videos Smarter & Faster | KeyCORS |
| DynaPictures | Generate Hundreds of Personalized Images in Minutes | KeyCORS |
| EmojiHub | Get emojis by categories and groups | NoneCORS |
| Europeana | European Museum and Galleries content | Key |
| Flickr | Flickr Services | OAuth |
| Generate Image Thumbnails API | Generate and optimise Image Thumbnails from any image with this API and save hours of image editing | KeyCORS |
| GetGenAI (Packaging Compliance Review) | Compliance review API for product labels and marketing assets — automated checks against regulations, retailer specs, and brand guidelines, always up to date | Key |
| Getty Images | Build applications using the world's most powerful imagery | OAuth |
| Gfycat | Jiffier GIFs | OAuth |
| Giphy | Get all your gifs | Key |
| Google Photos | Integrate Google Photos with your apps or devices | OAuth |
| Harvard Art Museums | Art | Key |
| Iconfinder | Icons | Key |
| Icons8 | Icons (find "search icon" hyperlink in page) | None |
| Image Upload | Image Optimization | Key |
| Imgur | Images | OAuth |
| Imsea | Free image search | None |
| Logotypes | Logotypes of the world in multiples format | NoneCORS |
| Lordicon | Icons with predone Animations | NoneCORS |
| Lorem Picsum | Images from Unsplash | None |
| Noun Project | Icons | OAuth |
| ObjectCut | Image Background removal | KeyCORS |
| Pexafy | Semantic image search across 9+ free stock photo sources (Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay & more), one unified JSON schema, plain-language and reverse image search | KeyCORS |
| Pexels | Free Stock Photos and Videos | KeyCORS |
| PhotoRoom | Remove background from images | Key |
| Picsart | Image & video editing, generative AI, 100+ AI models via unified API | KeyCORS |
| Pika | Image Generation API | KeyCORS |
| Pixabay | Photography | Key |
| Pixel Encounter | SVG Icon Generator | None |
| PixelVault | Agent-first image hosting with instant CDN URLs | Key |
| Poof | Image & video background removal API | KeyCORS |
| Remove Background from Images API | This API helps you remove background from any image | KeyCORS |
| Remove.bg | Image Background removal | Key |
| ReSmush.it | Photo optimization | None |
| Rijksmuseum | RijksMuseum Data | Key |
| Screenshotlayer | URL to screenshot | None |
| ShotOG | Open-source OG image generation with 8 templates, custom fonts, and batch generation | KeyCORS |
| shutterstock | Stock Photos and Videos | OAuth |
| Sirv | Image management solutions like optimization, manipulation, hosting | Key |
| Smart Adaptive Ultra-Fast Image Compressor & Converter | Compress, convert, and optimize images automatically with adaptive AI tuning | KeyCORS |
| Templated | Generate images and PDFs with a simple API. Design in a Canva-like editor and render images with code | KeyCORS |
| Text-till-Kladdesign | AI fashion design generator — transform Swedish text into clothing concepts | KeyCORS |
| The Color | Swiss army knife for color | None |
| Thisispaper | Curated architecture, design, photography and art projects with visual-similarity and taste metadata | KeyCORS |
| Tinify.dev | Image compression, resize and crop API with usage metadata | Key |
| Unsplash | Photography | OAuth |
| UpRes | AI image upscaling to 8K with 18 models (Real-ESRGAN, SeedVR2, AuraSR) | KeyCORS |
| Wallhaven | Wallpapers | Key |
| Webdam | Images | OAuth |
| Word Cloud | Easily create word clouds | Key |