What is Entipic?

Entipic is a service offering every subject or topic — Google, Barack Obama, Paris — a representative image that can be freely used by any application.

The idea is simple, and easiest to explain by analogy: Gravatar gives every email address a picture. Entipic gives every topic a picture.

The service is particularly useful for news sites and blogs that want to associate a representative image with each tag or topic.

Using the service

To attach an image to a topic, build a URL in this format:

https://cdn.entipic.com/[language]-[country]/[size]/[topic].jpg

[language]

Two-letter language code (e.g. en, fr, ro).

[country]

Two-letter country code (e.g. us, fr, ro). Optional but recommended.

[size]

Requested image size — one of:
a 50×50b 100×100c 150×150d 200×200e 250×250f 300×300x 25×25

[topic]

The topic name, 2–50 characters. Casing and separators don't matter — barack-obama, Barack Obama and Barack_Obama all resolve to the same topic.

Examples

• https://cdn.entipic.com/en/barack-obama.jpg50×50 picture for Barack Obama (English).
• https://cdn.entipic.com/en/c/twitter.jpg150×150 picture for Twitter.
• https://cdn.entipic.com/fr/b/paris.jpg100×100 picture for Paris (French).
• https://cdn.entipic.com/ro-ro/b/Adrian_Ursu.jpg100×100 picture for Adrian Ursu (Romania, Romanian).

How it works

For every request the system returns an image associated with the topic. If the topic is unknown, a temporary 1×1 pixel image is returned while the system searches for the best match in the background. Subsequent requests will receive the discovered picture.

Entipic respects image copyright — sources are tracked and attributed, and most images come from Wikipedia.