These 3 Websites makes Creating Graphics a Breeze

Let’s be honest, dealing with assets is one of the most annoying parts of frontend development. We’re not graphic designers, but we constantly need to create mockups, find decent placeholder images, and clean up random photos.

Over the years, I’ve replaced my entire “image editing” workflow with a few killer websites. They’re fast, free, and built for developers. These are the three I use on every single project.

1. For Mockups That Don’t Suck: Shots.so

You’ve built a killer new feature. How do you show it off on your landing page or in a tweet? A boring, rectangular screenshot isn’t going to cut it. You need a professional mockup.

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This is my go-to. Shots.so is dead simple. You paste in a screenshot, and it instantly puts it into a beautiful, browser-like window. You can add cool backgrounds, padding, and shadows in seconds. It’s the fastest way to make your work look incredibly polished.

2. For Placeholders Without the Hassle: Picsum Photos

Every developer knows the pain of needing a placeholder image. You end up on some stock photo site, fighting with watermarks, or just using a weird gray box. There’s a much better way.

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Picsum Photos is a developer’s dream. You just need an <img> tag. You literally type https://picsum.photos/800/600 into the src attribute, and you get a random 800x600 image. That’s it. It’s perfect for testing layouts, building prototypes, or filling out a user-generated content section before you have real data.

3. For Magically Deleting Stuff from Images: Cleanup.pictures

Someone sends you a product photo, but there’s a distracting coffee cup in the background. Or maybe you want to remove a logo or a person from an image. Previously, this was a job for a Photoshop expert. Not anymore.

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This tool is pure magic. With Cleanup.pictures, you upload an image, use a brush to highlight the thing you want to remove, and it just… disappears. The AI fills in the background seamlessly. It’s one of those tools that feels like it should be illegal.

Your New Workflow

• Need a placeholder? Picsum.
• Need to make that placeholder look good in a mockup? Shots.so.
• Need to remove a weird object from that placeholder? Cleanup.pictures.

These three tools will save you hours of work. Bookmark them and thank me later.