jQuery - Can I animate css properties? Background-image particularly

Question

I know I can fade in and out divs and elements, but can I animate properties as well? I thought about this just now when changing background-image property of a certain div. And thought it'd be cool if the background image was faded in as well ;)

Here's the code I'm using to replace background image. But can it be animated?

var originalBG = $('#wrapper').css('background-image');
$('.bggallery_images img').hover(function () {
    var newBG = "url('" + $(this).attr('src');

    $('#wrapper').css('background-image', newBG);
}, function () {
    $('#wrapper').css('background-image', originalBG);
});

Answer 1

jQuery has the animate() method that does exactly that.

Check out the examples in the manual, they should show you everything you need.

Answer 2

JQuery UI is a plug in that extends the animation function to animate color if that's what you're looking to do with the background. Basically if JQuery doesn't do it, there's most likely a library that extends it to have that functionality.