Wallhaven API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=nature&categories=010&purity=100&sorting=relevance

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 15,610 bytes · compressed

Response time

219 ms (median of 3) · fastest 218 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services

Browser CORS

No Access-Control-Allow-Origin header — call it from a server, not the browser

Rate limit

45 per window (44 remaining at test time)

Served by

cloudflare

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=nature&categories=010&purity=100&sorting=relevance on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "p2o5yj",
      "url": "https://wallhaven.cc/w/p2o5yj",
      "short_url": "https://whvn.cc/p2o5yj",
      "views": 8470,
      "favorites": 51,
      "source": "",
      "purity": "sfw",
      "category": "anime",
      "dimension_x": 3200,
      "dimension_y": 1800,
      "resolution": "3200x1800",
      "ratio": "1.78",
      "file_size": 1234213,
      "file_type": "image/jpeg",
      "…": "(4 more fields)"
    }
  ],
  "meta": {
    "current_page": 1,
    "last_page": 251,
    "per_page": 24,
    "total": 6007,
    "query": "nature",
    "seed": null
  }
}

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=nature&categories=010&purity=100&sorting=relevance";
// Replace headers or query params with the values required by this API.
const response = await fetch(url, {
  headers: {
  "X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"
  }
});
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=nature&categories=010&purity=100&sorting=relevance"
headers = {"X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl -X GET "https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=nature&categories=010&purity=100&sorting=relevance" -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

What Can You Build?

// Fetch a random photo
const headers = { 'X-Api-Key': 'YOUR_API_KEY' };
const response = await fetch(`https://wallhaven.cc/help/api`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const photo = data.urls || data;
const imgUrl = photo.regular || photo.url || photo.src?.medium || '';
console.log('Photo URL:', imgUrl);
document.getElementById('photo').src = imgUrl;

// Search for photos by keyword
const headers = { 'X-Api-Key': 'YOUR_API_KEY' };
const query = 'mountains';
const response = await fetch(`https://wallhaven.cc/help/api`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const photos = data.results || data.photos || data.hits || [];
photos.slice(0, 5).forEach(photo => {
  const url = photo.urls?.small || photo.src?.small || photo.url;
  console.log(`📸 ${photo.description || photo.alt || 'Photo'}: ${url}`);
});

// Build a photo gallery grid
const headers = { 'X-Api-Key': 'YOUR_API_KEY' };
const response = await fetch(`https://wallhaven.cc/help/api`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const photos = data.results || data.photos || [];
const gallery = document.getElementById('gallery');
photos.slice(0, 12).forEach(photo => {
  const img = document.createElement('img');
  img.src = photo.urls?.thumb || photo.src?.tiny || photo.url || '';
  img.alt = photo.description || photo.alt || 'Photo';
  gallery.appendChild(img);
});

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

{
  "error": "Not Found"
}

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.