Articles Tagged images

There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.

That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.

I recently found a solution to dynamically update the color of any product image. So with just one <img /> of a product, we can colorize it in different ways to show different color options. We don’t even need any fancy SVG or CSS to get it done!

We’ll be using an image editor (e.g. Photoshop or Sketch) and the image transformation service imgix. (This isn’t a sponsored post and there is no affiliation here — it’s just a … Read article

Let’s take a look at a super lightweight way to create a horizontal masonry effect for a set of arbitrarily-sized photos. Throw any set of photos at it, and they will line up edge-to-edge with no gaps anywhere.

The solution is not only lightweight but also quite simple. We’ll be using an unordered list of images and just 17 lines of CSS, with the heavy lifters being flexbox and object-fit.… Read article

Say you have an image you're using in an <img /> that is 800x600 pixels. Will it actually display as 800px wide on your site? It's very likely that it will not. We tend to put images into flexible container elements, and the image inside is set to width: 100%;. So perhaps that image ends up as 721px wide, or 381px wide, or whatever. What doesn't change is that image's aspect ratio, lest you squish it awkwardly (ignoring the … Read article

IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:

<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />

… Read article

The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:

img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height auto; /* default */
}

Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end developer devices (like mine with 16GB RAM), few or no performance problems occur. But on low-end devices? It’s another story.… Read article

Web developers and content editors alike often forget or ignore one of the most important parts of making a website accessible and SEO performant: image alt​ text. You know, that seemingly small image attribute that describes an image:

​​​<img src="/cute/sloth/image.jpg" alt="A brown baby sloth staring straight into the camera with a tongue sticking out." >

📷 Credit: Huffington Post

If you regularly publish content on the web, then you know it can be tedious trying to come up with descriptive … Read article