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The API exposes thumbnail URLs on every printing. They’re suitable for collection trackers, deck builders, set checklists, and anywhere a small recognizable card image is enough.

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Format

PropertyValue
Long-edge max512 pixels
FormatWebP (with JPEG fallback negotiated by Accept)
AspectCard-native (typically 5:7 portrait)
Color profilesRGB
Image URLs appear on the Printing DTO as image_url (front) and, where applicable, image_url_back for double-faced cards. Field names are stable; the URL contents are not — see “URL stability” below.

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What you can do

  • Display them. Inline in your UI, in tooltips, in social embeds. No restrictions on how they’re rendered.
  • Cache them. Store the bytes, set a long TTL, serve them through your own CDN. Recommended at any non-trivial scale.
  • Resize them down. Generating smaller derivatives (thumbnails, list-row icons) is fine.

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What you can’t do

  • Hotlink at scale. The URLs we return today resolve to a Cloudflare-fronted bucket. We make no commitment that any particular image URL will be reachable for any particular duration. A high-traffic public site that hotlinks our URLs will see broken images the day we rotate the bucket.
  • Resize up. Don’t upscale a 512px source to 4K and present it as full-resolution art. The base asset isn’t there; you’ll just get blurry pixels.
  • Republish as a dataset. Bulk-downloading every image and posting them as a torrent or dataset is one of the things that ends a developer account. See Abuse policy.

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URL stability

Image URLs follow a deterministic shape today, but we treat the URLs themselves as implementation details: 
https://images.elestrals.com/printings/<printing_id>/<variant>.webp
What we do commit to:
  • The image_url field will be present and non-null on every printing.
  • The image at the URL will match the printing it’s returned with.
  • Migrating to a new URL scheme will be announced in the changelog at least 30 days in advance.
What we don’t commit to:
  • The exact URL format remaining images.elestrals.com/....
  • The same physical file being served forever from the same URL.
  • Bandwidth or availability of these URLs for direct hotlinking.
Treat the URL as a reference to fetch and cache, not as a permanent address.

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Full-resolution art

We don’t serve full-resolution art via the API today, on any tier. If you have a use case that genuinely needs it — print runs, official tournament displays, partner integrations with the Elestrals brand team — write to support and tell us what you need. We’ll evaluate case by case. For everything that fits in 512px, the thumbnail is what we ship.