Minecraft skin download

The raw skin file behind any username or UUID, as a PNG you can save, edit or re-upload. Capes as well. One URL, no key and no login.

/jeb_/skin

/jeb_/cape

The URL

https://skinrender.dev/render/jeb_/skin?size=64&download=true
https://skinrender.dev/render/069a79f444e94726a5befca90e38aaf5/skin?size=64&download=true

The skin render type hands back the texture itself rather than a render of it: the 64×64 sheet with the head, the body, the limbs and every overlay laid out exactly where the game expects them. Paste one of those URLs in the address bar and the file lands in your downloads folder. Username or UUID both work, dashes in the UUID optional.

Ask for 64, or you get an upscale

This is the one thing worth knowing. Like every other type, skin has a default canvas — 256 px — so a bare /skin request returns the sheet blown up 4× with nearest-neighbour edges. That is handy for showing a texture on a page, and wrong for a file you intend to edit or upload. size=64 gives you the texture at its own resolution, pixel for pixel what Mojang serves, re-encoded by this server as a plain 64×64 RGBA PNG — the shape the skin uploader on minecraft.net expects.

/render/jeb_/skin?size=64     # 64×64, the real thing
/render/jeb_/skin             # 256×256, upscaled for display
/render/jeb_/skin?size=1024   # 1024×1024, for a texture editor that wants room

Parameters that describe a camera or a pose have nothing to do with a flat sheet, so they are ignored rather than refused; the response lists them in the X-Ignored-Params header if you want to catch a typo in a script.

Saving instead of displaying

download=1 sets Content-Disposition: attachment, which is what turns a link into a save. Without it the browser shows the PNG in the tab, which is what you want for an <img> and not what you want for a button. filename names the file; the default is the identifier and the type, so jeb_-skin.png.

<a href="https://skinrender.dev/render/jeb_/skin?size=64&download=true&filename=jeb-skin">
  Download this skin
</a>

From a terminal, curl is shorter than any of this, and a list of names becomes a folder of skins in one line:

curl -o jeb_.png "https://skinrender.dev/render/jeb_/skin?size=64"

for name in Notch jeb_ Dinnerbone; do
  curl -sfo "$name.png" "https://skinrender.dev/render/$name/skin?size=64"
done

What is a Minecraft skin URL?

Every skin anyone has uploaded lives at one address on Mojang’s texture server: https://textures.minecraft.net/texture/<hash>. The hash is 64 hexadecimal characters and names that exact image, so the URL never changes what it points at; when a player changes skin, their profile simply points at a new hash. That address is the skin URL.

A username does not lead there directly. The game, and this server, first turn the name into a UUID, then ask Mojang’s session server for the profile (sessionserver.mojang.com/session/minecraft/profile/<uuid>). The profile carries a base64 textures property; decoded, it is a small JSON document whose SKIN.url is the skin URL, with metadata.model set to "slim" for Alex-style arms and a CAPE.url when there is a cape. /api/profile/<name or uuid> does all of that in one request and hands you the result as skinUrl and skinHash, always in the https form.

GET https://skinrender.dev/api/profile/Notch

"skinUrl":  "https://textures.minecraft.net/texture/292009a4925b58f02c77dadc3ecef07ea4c7472f64e0fdc32ce5522489362680"
"skinHash": "292009a4925b58f02c77dadc3ecef07ea4c7472f64e0fdc32ce5522489362680"

# the same texture, as a 64×64 download from this server
https://skinrender.dev/render/texture:292009a4925b58f02c77dadc3ecef07ea4c7472f64e0fdc32ce5522489362680/skin?size=64&download=true

The hash also works as an identifier here: /render/texture:<hash>/skin serves that texture, the face, head and body renders draw it, with no profile lookup and a response cached as immutable, because the image behind a hash can never change. To wear a stored texture on someone else’s render, pass it as skin=<hash or skin URL>. Only textures.minecraft.net addresses are accepted; the server fetches nothing from anywhere else.

Capes

A cape lives on the profile beside the skin and is a separate texture, so it has its own type: /cape returns the cape artwork flat. The front of a cape is 10×16 rather than square, and size is the height, so size=16 is the unscaled original and anything larger is a clean multiple of it. Most accounts have no cape, and that is not an error — the response is a valid, fully transparent PNG, which keeps an <img> on a profile card from breaking. When you need to branch on it, ask /api/profile/<id> first: it answers with the model, the skin URL and hash, and capeHash, which is null when there is nothing to fetch.

const profile = await fetch("https://skinrender.dev/api/profile/jeb_").then((r) => r.json());
if (profile.capeHash) {
  // profile.capeUrl is Mojang's own texture URL; this is the flat render of it
  save(`https://skinrender.dev/render/${profile.uuid}/cape?size=16&download=1`);
}

Old skins, missing skins

Skins from before 1.8 are 64×32: one arm, one leg, no overlays below the head. Those are upgraded to the 64×64 layout on the way in — the second arm and leg are mirrored into place and the empty regions stay transparent — so what you download is always a modern sheet you can open in any skin editor. A player who has never set a skin, or a name that does not exist, gives you Steve or Alex instead of a 404, chosen the way the game chooses; the X-Skin-Fallback header says so, and default=none asks for the 404 when a script should notice. The caching and limits page covers the rest of the headers.

Or skip the file

Downloading the sheet is the long way round if all you wanted was a picture of the player. Face renders make profile pictures, head renders make icons and cards, and body renders with poses make the full model, cape included — all from the same URL, no download and no image pipeline of your own.