On a webpage I am rendering a collection of images. Some images are portrait orientation, some are landscape, all are larger than the desired render size.
I want to display these images in a gallery of neat, uniformly sized, square thumbnails.
How can I do thus using only CSS?
I would like to avoid a javascript library if possible. I don't need to select a part of the image to display, just any central-ish square area.
I've seen this question asked elsewhere, but have not yet found an answer that seems to work with all orientations (e.g., portraits may get correctly cropped/resized, landscapes do not).
You could still use server side technology to resize the image via cURL; however, that is neither here nor there. One thing to understand, CSS is not really a programming language, as in, it cannot make decisions or do any real math, so we can't make dynamic decisions with just CSS.
That being said, you could create divs for your gallery, and use CSS to set the background image to the desired image. In CSS3 there is a property called background-size. You can set the size in pixels manually, but it will not maintain aspect ratio that way, so it will probably look awful. Setting the background-size: cover will scale the image so that it completely fills the background area while cutting off the excess. Setting background-size: contain will scale the image so that it maintains its original aspect ratio and fills the background without cutting off the image. Here is a little code that kind of explains how to use it. jsFiddle
EDIT: I forgot to mention that this solution will only work in IE9+ (should work fine in FF, Chrome and Safari)
I suggest having a div wrap the images. You can specify a width and height on this wrapper with a overflow:hidden.
Related
I have little website I'm trying to plan on building. But when I started making the background image for it, the image is made so my website is kind of scrolling web page up and down so I made it long. But now the image only shows small part of it, I trying changing resolution of my browser and I could see it but without that I cannot scroll to see the whole image.
The problem which shows that the photo is not fully shown, photo is 2160*3840 px means it is opposite of normal resolution:
If you're using CSS and adding this as a background image to the page body, then it should be an easy problem to solve (and in fact you get quite a few options).
Firstly, lets assume this is your current code:
body {
background-image:url("yourimage.png"); /* The filetype does not matter */
}
Now, as far as CSS sees it, some people viewing your site could be on phones, some on 13" laptops, or some could be viewing it on 5k desktops - if we want the image to work on all at all of these different sizes, then clearly the image is going to have to be modified in some way.
By adding the background-size property here, we can adjust how this happens:
background-size:cover; seems like the best choice for you. It will slightly crop / stretch the image to fit it (but remember, this is probably going to be beneficial).
background-size:100% 100%; will always display 100% of the image - but this will usually result in it being stretched, etc.
There are quite a few other values this property can be set to - you can take a look at them here, or read the spec on it over at MDN.
I am trying to build a deals page which are pulled from amazon.in.I basically go to a deal and copy the image and upload to my server.
But due to different size of the images on amazon.in when I shrink it by 200*200 size for the deal thumbnail, some of the images are getting distorted.
In the below image you can see that the Amazon Basics cable is properly scaled, where as the iphone 7 image is distorted due to the nature of images at amazon.in.
What is the general recommendation for these problems? How do we solve this issue so that I get uniform images for my deals?
If the image does not have an aspect ratio of 1:1 (which is the ratio for your thumbnails) it will get distorted because there's more length in one dimension than the other and if try to match them, one of them will have to be squeezed. That's where the distortion comes from.
The only thing that will work is to give the images a new aspect ratio that matches your template
This can be done with CSS like #SaidbakR mentioned in the comments
Fix the width and place the image in a div with oveflow:none and fixed height to hide the extra height.
This will work beautifully but some images will just not work. They will just be cutoff in the wrong places.
The only other thing you can do is to manually edit the photos in Photoshop or something similar. This can work on all images, but manually editing each and every photo that doesn't fit is a pain in the neck.
nevertheless, here's what you end up with.
Before: Original Image in full dimensions
After: Image edited in a program like Photoshop to the desired size of 200x200 with no distortion
So? My Suggested fix is to adjust your approach/template or find another source for your images.
See this:
http://real-sense.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=106
The set of vertical images on the right are being resized using CSS
.thumbnail-product-resize
{
width:144px;
height : auto;
}
Does anyone know how to do this in a cleaner way so I don't lose quality on the image?
I mean that if I had resized the image using photoshop, the text won't appear as blurry as it does here.
Tested in FF
Thanks
The quality of your images will depend on the original size of the image you use. If have a large image with good quality, say of size 400x500, and it is then resized in the HTML to 80x100, it will still be a 400x500 image. However you can only fit a certain number of pixels on a smaller image of 80x100, so this bigger image has to be sampled. This means that an average is taken of pixels and then made to represent a 80x100 size image.
If you want a more definite result you can change to original size of the image to 80x100. This will probably give you better results.
Once upon a time browser image resizing gave truly heinous results due to the unsophisticated nearest neighbor technique they used to scale images. Now they usually perform filtering when scaling and there isn't that much difference between in-browser resizing and resizing in Photoshop.
The real advantage to scaling an image before serving it to the client is that you aren't forcing the download of large images when they aren't necessary. Depending on the size of your images, this can significantly reduce your page load times.
One final thing to consider is that more and more people have devices with "retina" displays. For those users scaling the image before serving it will result in much less crisp images.
Here's an in-depth comparison of the image scaling methods used by various browsers: http://entropymine.com/resamplescope/notes/browsers/
Even if you had done this in photoshop those images you have would still appear pretty much the way do just now.
FYI you don't need to include height:auto in your CSS above.
Best bet would be to create a seperate set of thumbnails (using photoshop) which maybe just show a portion of the image.
Loading the thumbnails and resizing them with css the way you are doing is bad practice as you are still having the user download the large images first.
It is impossible to shrink an image without loosing quality unless it is an vector-image. That would mean that you'd have to use SVG. And considering the images displayed I don't think you wan't to do that.
Also you mentioned the cleaner way to do it, use photoshop or something similar.
I have a layout with multiple images, both portrait and landscape. I would like to make each image take up as much space as possible within the browser window, whilst remaining entirely visible.
Is there a simple way to do this? I've tried searching but everything coming up is for making a single full screen DIV or image, rather than the multiple images I'd like to use.
You can use the background-size property, which has a value cover, that does exactly this. For older IE browsers which don't support this, a jQuery CSS hooks fix has been made available.
You just have to layout your DIVs using proportional CSS width values, and then assign each one a covering background image.
I think perhaps you are looking for something like this: http://masonry.desandro.com/demos/images.html
I created a black and white collage consisting of a number of images - but saved the file as 1280*1024 - ideally encompassing that rez of a screen.
The issue is, would it be wiser to have the background scale, and stretch the images in the case of a larger screen or should I have it repeat so as not to lose resolution, and have smaller screens cropped from some of the background?
Thanks for any insight!
I personally don't think scaling an image up is ever an option. It's incredibly noticeable, and it doesn't look good. I would recommend using a background image that at least works on 1920 x 1080, and gracefully fade out the image on the edges or tiles well so if someone sees the page on an even larger screen, there aren't strong lines on the edges of the background.
If you are concerned about the bandwidth involved in large images, check out CSS3 Media Queries. All mobile browsers support this CSS3 module, and it will allow you to target certain resolutions and send them smaller images (both in dimensions and file size).
If your image does tile well, I would recommend going with the smallest pattern, and letting css do the repetition for you. There's no point in pushing more pixels down the pipe than necessary.
It's up to the user really but they obviously can't make that decision. I'd scale it but that's not as easy as tiling it. I've never successfully scaled a background image.
It will also depend on your preference.
Are you okay with having a stretched image as a background, in case the user has a larger screen? If yes, then by all means set the background image to stretch. Or, are you more keen on preserving the integrity of the image? In the latter case, it's much better to have the image tile.
If you're interested in creating a full page background image, try one of these techniques found on CSS Tricks: "Perfect Full Page Background Image".