Incorrect behavior of faker.image functions

[JoCat]

Describe the bug

Some image functions associated with the placeimg.com service do not work due to the fact that the service has abolished some image categories.

example:

faker.image.abstract()
faker.image.business()
faker.image.cats()
faker.image.city() // replace link to arch
faker.image.fashion()
faker.image.food()
faker.image.nightlife()
faker.image.sports()
faker.image.technics() // replace link to tech
faker.image.transport()

maybe you should also check related function faker.image.image()

list of current categories taken from placeimg.com:

Reproduction

https://stackblitz.com/edit/faker-js-demo-bbhemk?file=index.ts

Additional Info

No response

[ST-DDT]

There are other categories that aren't working either e.g. cats.

[Shinigami92]

There are other categories that aren't working either e.g. cats.

[franznoel]

So, do we have other alternative sources? or are we going to remove the non-existing ones?

[JoCat]

In principle, there are enough services on the Internet for obtaining images. It remains only to choose normal

[Shinigami92]

I'm not yet sure if we want to just provide more and more alternative services, or if we may want to provide a helper/factory functionality to just provide an image provider yourself but have a defined way of getting the random images.
That way you could easily swap in and out an image provider 🤔

@ST-DDT should we count this as v6.1 bug fix? or is it really needed right now in v6.0 and holding us back to release a v6.0.0?
I think and assume this issue is also present in v5.5.3 also 🤔

[ST-DDT]

The links are working (although the show wrong content). removing the methods would be more breaking.
Thus I agree with moving this to v6.1.

[JoCat]

faker.image.cats() maybe raplaced to https://placekitten.com/

there is also: https://loremflickr.com/
it looks like it has a selection by categories

there is also https://picsum.photos/ but there seems to be no selection by category

[Shinigami92]

IMO this is a bigger issue to tackle, so unless someone wants to propose a PR that somehow easily fix this, I would like to move this into v7+ and rethink about the whole image provider structure.
So now we can fix and release soon the v6.1 bug fixes and move on to v6.2.

[JoCat]

I can try to implement this, only a little later
weekends for example

[JoCat]

rethink about the whole image provider structure

Yes, I think it won't hurt

by the way, I noticed that there are other image providers in the code. But the site is the same lorempixel.com does not work

[damienwebdev]

I think this can be closed. There's a much larger project here which is to decide upon a FakeImageProvider interface that has externally provided options with a sane default. This would allow us to mitigate these kinds of problems. When we begin that process, I'll open a new issue and link it from here.