Set width/height of image to avoid reflow on image load

Question

When I use image tags in html, I try to specify its width and height in the img tag, so that the browser will reserve the space for them even before the images are loaded, so when they finish loading, the page does not reflow (the elements do not move around). For example:

<img width="600" height="400" src="..."/> 

The problem is now I want to create a more "responsive" version, where for the "single column case" I'd like to do this:

<img style="max-width: 100%" src="..."/> 

but, if I mix this with explicitly specified width and height, like:

<img style="max-width: 100%" width="600" height="400" src="..."/> 

and the image is wider than the available space, then the image is resized ignoring the aspect ratio. I understand why this happens (because I "fixed" the height of the image), and I would like to fix this, but I have no idea how.

To summarize: I want to be able to specify max-width: 100%, and also somehow make sure the content is not reflowed when the images are loaded.

Answer 1

UPDATE 2: (Dec 2019)

Firefox and Chrome now deal with this by default. Simply add the width and height attributes as normal. See this blog post for more details.

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UPDATE 1: (July 2018)

I found a much cleverer alternate version of this: http://cssmojo.com/aspect-ratio-using-custom-properties-and-calc/. This still requires a wrapper element and it requires CSS custom properties, but I think it's much more elegant. Codepen example is here (credit to Chris Coyier's original).

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ORIGINAL:

From this blog post by Jonathan Hollin: add the image's height and width as part of an inline style. This reserves space for the image, preventing reflow when the image loads, but it's also responsive.

HTML

<figure style="padding-bottom: calc((400/600)*100%)">   <img src="/images/kitten.jpg" /> </figure> 

CSS

figure {   position: relative; }  img {   max-width: 100%;   position: absolute; } 

The figure can be replaced with a div or any other container of your choice. This solution relies on CSS calc() which has pretty wide browser support.

Working Codepen can be seen here.

Answer 2

I'm also looking for the answer to this problem. With max-width, width= and height=, the browser has enough data that it should be able to leave the right amount of space for an image but it just doesn't seem to work that way.

I worked around this with a jQuery solution for now. It requires you to provide the width= and height= for your <img> tags.

CSS:

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

HTML:

<img src="image.png" width="400" height="300" /> 

jQuery:

$('img').each(function() {      var aspect_ratio = $(this).attr('height') / $(this).attr('width') * 100;     $(this).wrap('<div style="padding-bottom: ' + aspect_ratio + '%">'); }); 

This automatically applies the technique seen on: http://andmag.se/2012/10/responsive-images-how-to-prevent-reflow/