If you've looked up an old Minecraft skin in the last ten years, you've probably used MCSkinHistory. It launched in 2016 to fix a simple problem. You changed your skin, lost the PNG, and had no way to get it back. For a long time it was the only site keeping that archive.
People still use it. They go looking for something else when it won't load, when the player they want isn't in it, or when they need to do more than look. Which of those you're dealing with decides where you should go next.
Compared side by side
Four sites cover this, and they don't do the same job.
The Crafty numbers come straight from the counters on the homepage, and they go up every day as more players get indexed.
Why you're looking
"MCSkinHistory won't load." This is the big one. Like any site it has bad days, and it usually comes back. Keep a second archive bookmarked so an outage doesn't stop you.
"The player isn't in it." Every one of these sites is a crawler that caught some accounts and missed others. None of them existed when Minecraft launched, so none of them has every skin anyone ever wore. If a player is missing from one, check another. It takes thirty seconds.
"I need it to do more." People forget this one. MCSkinHistory is a skin, cape and server database. If you want to edit the skin you just found, check a crafting recipe, or pull a render into a Discord bot, you need a toolkit, and a lookup site won't cover that.
What Crafty does differently
Crafty reads the same source as everyone else, Mojang's public profile data. For "which skins has this account worn", the sites should mostly agree. What sets Crafty apart is everything around that.
Capes are catalogued. Every cape has its own page. It says how the cape was earned, whether you can still get it, and how many accounts in the index wear it. There are 56. That last number tells you whether a cape is actually rare, and most sites don't show it.
You can browse skins without a username. Start from skins by colour or from what players are wearing right now. Most skin history sites assume you already know whose skin you want.
The tools live on the same site. The 3D skin editor, the crafting recipe index, the enchanting table translator and the rest of the tools are all part of Crafty. Find an old skin and edit it in the next tab, no PNG juggling.
It's free and there's no login. Every lookup and every download.
When another site is the better pick
Crafty doesn't win everything.
- Name availability and drop times. NameMC has the deepest tooling for when a username frees up. If you're chasing a specific name, go there. Crafty covers username history and availability, but it doesn't do name sniping timers.
- Server voting. MCSkinHistory's server list runs a voting and rewards system that server owners actually use. Crafty has a server list with live status, but the communities are different.
- LabyMod players. If the account uses LabyMod, Laby.net has profile data tied to that client that nobody else has.
Bedrock skins
Every site in that table is a Java Edition tool, Crafty included. That's a hard limit, not laziness. Bedrock players are Xbox accounts, and Microsoft doesn't publish skins, name history or a public profile endpoint the way Mojang does for Java. You can't build a Bedrock skin archive without that data.
You can still look some things up on Bedrock, just less. We cover what works in looking up a Bedrock player by gamertag. If a site claims full Bedrock skin history, be suspicious.
Test before you switch
Pick an account whose skin history you already know. Yours is ideal. Look it up on two sites, and in about a minute you'll know whether both have the account, how far back each archive goes, and whether you can download clean PNGs or only renders. That last part catches people out. A 3D render isn't a skin file, and Minecraft won't accept it as one.
Start with yours on the player lookup.
FAQ
Is MCSkinHistory shut down?
No, it's still running. It goes down now and then, and each time it's come back. An outage is also the most common reason people search for an alternative, so if it won't load for you, try one of the sites above and check back later.
Can I get a skin someone deleted years ago?
Only if an archive crawled that account while the skin was on it. Mojang keeps no public history, so every skin history site is showing you its own crawl, not an official record. If nobody indexed the account back then, the skin is gone.
Do these sites show Bedrock skins?
No, and none of them can. Bedrock accounts are Xbox accounts, and Microsoft publishes no skin or name history for them. A site claiming full Bedrock skin archives is guessing, or showing you a Java account with a similar name.
Is Crafty free?
Yes. Player lookups, skin and cape history, PNG downloads, the skin editor and the crafting recipes are all free, with no account. There's an optional Pro tier for extras, and nothing in this article needs it.
Which one has the most skins?
Crafty is the only one of the four that publishes its counts: 37.7 million skins across 77.4 million players, and climbing. The others don't share their index sizes, so you can't rank them without taking marketing claims on faith. For the account you care about, checking two archives tells you more than any headline number.