CSS: How to overlay images

Question

I want to overlay one image with another using CSS. An example of this is the first image (the background if you like) will be a thumbnail link of a product, with the link opening a lightbox / popup showing a larger version of the image.

On top of this linked image I would like an image of a magnifying glass, to show people that the image can be clicked to enlarge it (apparently this isn't obvious without the magnifying glass).

Answer 1

One technique, suggested by this article, would be to do this:

<img style="background:url(thumbnail1.jpg)" src="magnifying_glass.png" />

Answer 2

I just got done doing this exact thing in a project. The HTML side looked a bit like this:

<a href="[fullsize]" class="gallerypic" title="">
  <img src="[thumbnail pic]" height="90" width="140" alt="[Gallery Photo]" class="pic" />
  <span class="zoom-icon"><img src="/images/misc/zoom.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="Zoom"></span>
</a>

Then using CSS:

a.gallerypic{
  width:140px;
  text-decoration:none;
  position:relative;
  display:block;
  border:1px solid #666;
  padding:3px;
  margin-right:5px;
  float:left;
}

a.gallerypic span.zoom-icon{
  visibility:hidden;
  position:absolute;
  left:40%;
  top:35%;
  filter:alpha(opacity=50);
  -moz-opacity:0.5;
  -khtml-opacity: 0.5;
  opacity: 0.5;
}

a.gallerypic:hover span.zoom-icon{
  visibility:visible;
}

I left a lot of the sample in there on the CSS so you can see how I decided to do the style. Note I lowered the opacity so you could see through the magnifying glass.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: To clarify for your example - you could ignore the visibility:hidden; and kill the :hover execution if you wanted, this was just the way I did it.

Answer 3

Unless you use the <img> tag, which displays an image by itself, you will not be able to achieve this with pure CSS alone. You will also need TWO HTML elements as well - one for each picture. This is because the only way you can make an element display a picture via CSS is with the background-image property, and every element can have only one background image. Which two elements you choose and how you position them is up to you. There are many ways how you can position one HTML element above another.

Answer 4

Here is how I did it recently. Not perfect semantically, but gets the job done.

<div class="container" style="position: relative">
<img style="z-index: 32; left: 8px; position: relative;" alt="bottom image" src="images/bottom-image.jpg">
<div style="z-index: 100; left: 72px; position: absolute; top: 39px">
<img alt="top image" src="images/top-image.jpg"></div></div>

Answer 5

If you're only wanting the magnifing glass on hover then you can use

a:hover img { cursor: url(glass.cur); }

http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/csscursors.shtml

If you want it there permanently you should probably either have it included in the original thumnail, or add it using JavaScript rather than adding it to the HTML (this is purely style and shouldn't be in the content).

Let me know if you want help on the JavaScript side.

Cheers, Steve

Answer 6

You might want to check out this tutorial: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-decorative-gallery/

In it the writer uses an empty span element to add an overlaying image. You can use jQuery to inject said span elements, if you'd like to keep your code as clean as possible. An example is also given in the aforementioned article.

Hope this helps!

-Dave

Answer 7

Hi,

A simple way of doing that with CSS only without modifying the content with additional tags is shown here (with code and example): http://soukie.net/2009/08/20/typography-and-css/#example

Cheers,

Pavel

Answer 8

A simple way of doing that with CSS only without modifying the content with additional tags is shown here (with code and example): http://soukie.net/2009/08/20/typography-and-css/#example

This works, as long as the parent element is not using static positioning. Simply setting it to relative positioning does the trick. Also, IE <8 don't support the :before selector or content.