Django Placeholdit

Django Placeholdit

2015 – PresentSee live
Steve on X

placehold.it was the go-to for placeholder images while a design comes together, until it went away. Django Placeholdit puts it inside your Django app instead, with the same URLs, so existing placehold.it links just work, with no third party to depend on.

I wrote it in 2015, and it's had over 22,000 downloads on PyPI.

Django Placeholdit

How it works

One URL pattern parses sizes, formats, colors and text exactly as placehold.it did, and images are drawn with ImageMagick, with the text sized to fit and centered on the font's real metrics, in any font you like, CJK included. Responses are cached for a week. In 2026 I brought it up to Django 5.2 and 6, tested against Python 3.10 to 3.14 at 100% coverage, with releases published to PyPI straight from GitHub.