What is Entipic.com?

Entipic.com is a service offering every subject/topic (i.e., Google, Barack Obama, Paris, etc.) a representative image that can be freely used by any application.

The idea of the service is quite simple and can be easily understood by taking as an example the service provided by Gravatar.com So, Gravatar.com offers to every email a picture/avatar, while Entipic.com provides a picture to each subject/topic.

The Entipic service can be especially used by news websites/blogs in order to associate a representative image to each tag/topic in the news.

Successful examples in this respect are: Leonard Doroftei, Apple, Beyonce.

How do I use the Entipic service?

To associate an image to a news topic on your site you must complete the following address: http://cdn.entipic.com/[language]-[country]/[size]/[topic].jpg.

Where:

[language] - is the language code (2 characters).
[country] - is the country code (2 characters) where the content is located. So if your site is in France, you should use fr code.
[size] - is the requested image size. The image size can be: a default (50x50 px), b (100x100 px), c (150x150 px), d (200x200 px), e (250x250 px), f (300x300 px), x (25x25 px).
[topic] - is the name of the topic. The topic can be between 2 (minimum) 50 (maximum) characters. It does not matter how the topic is written; the topics barack-obama, Barack Obama, or Barack_Obama are identical.

Exemple:

http://cdn.entipic.com/en/barack-obama.jpg - is associating a 50x50 pixel image to Barack Obama (English) topic.
http://cdn.entipic.com/en/c/twitter.jpg - is associating a 150x150 pixel image to Twitter topic.
http://cdn.entipic.com/fr/b/paris.jpg - is associating a 100x100 pixel image to Paris (Franch) topic.
http://cdn.entipic.com/ro-ro/b/Adrian_Ursu.jpg - is associating a 100x100 pixel image to Adrian Ursu (Romania in Romanian language) topic.

Note. Only the [topic] variable is required, however it is a good practice to indicate the context (language and country code) of the topic, especially when short words are used. Thus, it is recommended to use the language code for all topics.

How it works?

For each request the system will return an image associated with the news topic. If the topic is unknown (or new) for the system, it will return a temporary image (1x1 pixel). Meanwhile, the system will search for the best picture to be associated with the news topic and for the next requests the system will return the found picture.

Entipic respects the copyright of the pictures used by the system. The source of the image is included. The most of the images are taken from Wikipedia.