Crafatar alternative

Switching from Crafatar or Minotar is a change to the URL you build, not to your app. Here is every endpoint next to the one that replaces it, and the handful of differences worth knowing before you swap.

/face

/head

/body

Crafatar, URL for URL

Same player, same picture, different path. Everything below takes the identifier you already have.

// before
const avatar = `https://crafatar.com/avatars/${uuid}?size=64&overlay`;

// after: overlays are already on, and a username works as well as a UUID
const avatar = `https://skinrender.dev/render/${uuid}/face?size=64`;

Minotar, URL for URL

Minotar puts the size in the path; here it is a query parameter, which is what lets the same URL carry a camera and a pose as well.

Visage’s /face/<size>/<uuid>, /bust/… and /full/… map the same way, onto face, bust and body with size.

The differences that bite

• Overlays are on by default. If your Crafatar URLs carry ?overlay, drop it. If they do not, and you want the bare skin, add overlay=false — or hat=false to lose only the hat.
• Names as well as UUIDs. A username, a dashed or dashless UUID, a texture hash, or steve and alex for the default skins. Whatever you have is enough.
• The angle is yours. Where the old endpoints each give one framing, yaw, pitch, fov and zoom are parameters, and pose=wave or a per-joint angle changes the model itself. That is the reason to switch rather than the compatibility.
• Missing capes are not errors. Most profiles have no cape; /cape answers 200 with a fully transparent PNG rather than failing, so an <img> on a profile card never breaks. The profile endpoint tells you in advance whether there is one.
• A missing player still renders. An unknown name or a player who never set a skin gives you Steve or Alex with an X-Skin-Fallback header; default=none asks for a 404 instead.
• The URL can end in .png if whatever you are pasting it into insists on an extension. It is the same request either way.

Swapping in practice

Change the URL builder in one place, keep your identifiers, and check three things: that overlays look the way you want, that the sizes still suit your layout (size is the height and the width follows the type, up to 1024), and that whatever caches for you sees the new URLs. Nothing else in your app has to move. The playground is the fastest way to land on the exact URL you want, and the link it gives you carries the settings, so you can paste the finished thing straight into your code.