There are a bunch of techniques going around for dealing with responsive images lately. That is, solutions to help us serve the right image for the occasion (e.g. size of screen and bandwidth available). They all do things a bit differently. To keep track, Christopher Schmitt and I have created this spreadsheet of techniques.

The spreadsheet has the data, but let's digest it through thinking about it through the lens of practical questions.


To choose which technique is right for you and your project these questions may help as a guide. Many of the questions may apply to your project, so you'll have to sort out which techniques fit what scenarios and find the overlap.

If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time
Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome.
There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life.
X-rays: just to clarify, Tesla did not discover x-rays, but he was one of the early pioneers in its research.
Cryogenic engineering: I'm referring to the cryogenic engineering that has to do with using liquified air to cool a coil and reduce its electrical resistance (Patent No. 11,865), not freezing people and waking them up in the future so they can fight Wesley Snipes.
Transistor: Tesla's influence on the modern transistor can be found in patents 723,188 and 725,605. (a better explanation here)
Radio: Tesla was the nicest geek ever until he decided to sue Marconi a few years later. 8 months after Tesla died, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patents on the invention of radio. So Tesla eventually won that battle, although he was dead by then.
Tesla VS Edison: I could write a novel on the differences between Tesla and Edison, but seeing as how this comic is already huge I decided to leave many things out. For instance, Edison killed cats and dogs, but Tesla loved animals and had a cat as a child. Originally Tesla wanted to be a poet, but after getting zapped by static electricity from his kitty he was inspired to study the effects of electricity. One could vaguely construe that Tesla's cat was responsible for the second industrial revolution, which arguably makes it the most awesome cat who ever lived.
Edison believed that fossil fuels were the future and that there were enough resources in South America to provide for the next 50,000 years. Tesla believed that renewable energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, and wind power were the future. This is remarkable because in the 1890s there was no such thing as "going green," so Tesla's ideas on conservation were very forward-thinking at the time.
Lastly, a big thank you to Jane C. Daugherty for proofreading this article for me. If you want to learn things from the most awesome librarian this side of the North American tectonic plate, follow her on Twitter.

a simple jQuery plugin that allows you to add a dynamically-resized background image to any page

online image editing/resizing service. No registration required

An easy-to-use and free tool for batch resizing of JPG pictures and photos.

Download PhotoResize400.exe and place it on your desktop.
Drag and drop JPG files or folders with JPG files on the application icon.
The tool will resize JPG images and save them next to the originals. Names of the new pictures will be based on the original names, with a suffix indicating their size. For example, the resized version of MyPhoto.jpg will be called MyPhoto-400.jpg, where the number 400 indicates the size of the picture.

ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

ImageOptim seamlessly integrates various optimisation tools: PNGOUT, AdvPNG, Pngcrush, extended OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpegrescan, jpegtran, and Gifsicle.

It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone/iPad applications smaller (see Xcode warning).

Why not give a little flair to your header. This tutorial will show you how to animate your header’s background image using jQuery to give your website that little extra something.

What We Are Building

We are going to build a header that animates it’s background. We will also encase the header in shadow for the little extra dramatic effect.

Downloadr is a photo downloader for Microsoft Windows. It provides a simple interface to download large sized images from Flickr to your computer. You do not need a Flickr account to use Downloadr, though you do have even more functionality (like the ability to do a complete backup of all your photos) if you register at flickr.com. For a comprehensive overview of what Downloadr is able to do please watch the Screencast.

Here is a short list of what Downloadr can currently do for you. This is not a complete list of all features, only the major ones are listed here. New features are added from time to time and you will automatically be able to use them thanks to Downloadr's update function. Please be aware that Downloadr is still beta software: Use it, but do not rely on it. It may harm your PC or your flickr account, even though it has been tested many times.

The viewer is Javascript based and uses the new HTML5 CSS 3D transforms for displaying the panoramas. These CSS 3D transforms are currently only available in the Mobile Safari and in Safari 5 Browser.

The possibilities compared to Flash are limited. It's only possible to use cubical pano images.
A triangle based 3D rendering, which would allow things like Fisheye / 'Little Planet' projections, spherical / cylindrical and partial panos is not possible with the CSS 3D transforms. Maybe there will be more possibilities in future when some real 3D graphics APIs (like WebGL) become available. But the current quality and performance is already really good and viewing panos makes fun, especially on the iPad ;-)

The resources are available to support a consistent user experience in applications leveraging Twitter & sites using Web Intents. It is recommended that you store these within your own application. For more information on using these marks, consult our Display Guidelines.

New version improvements

Among other small improvements, this release allows preloading images from any directory specified in the CSS. Also offers load status updates for text and image-based load bars.

IIPMooViewer – Ajax Javascript Viewer

I love jQuery and the way it makes developer's life easier. Although it took me a while to accept it and I still prefer to write my own stuff, I can't deny its advantages. Recently I had a project that demanded a rollover image preview. You know, one of those tooltip-like bubble popups that appears when you roll over link or a thumbnail. Since we were already using jQuery on that project I decided to take it easy and investigate what can be done with that extraordinary library. So I came up with a script so simple it hurts! The best thing yet is that it can be applied for a variety of purposes. Today I will show you 3 examples of using the same very, very simple script.

In this tutorial we are going to create a nice and fresh image gallery. The idea is to show the albums as a slider, and when an album is chosen, we show the images of that album as a beautiful photo stack. In the photo stack view, we can browse through the images by putting the top most image behind all the stack with a slick animation.

imgAreaSelect is a jQuery plugin for selecting a rectangular area of an image. It allows web developers to easily implement image cropping functionality, as well as other user interface features, such as photo notes (like those on Flickr).

I work for a well known retail/online flooring store, and was recently asked to replace an antiquated (and defunct) image zoom application with something cheaper and more reliable than its more modern replacement (which would cost us thousands of dollars per month to license). iFloor is known for having extremely high resolution photographs of their products, and we needed new a way to display them that was easy for customers to use, as well as light on processing power and bandwidth, not to mention easy for developers and system administrators to maintain.

CrossSlide is a jQuery plugin implementing in 2kB1 of Javascript code some common slide-show animations, traditionally only available via Adobe Flash™ or other proprietary plugins. CrossSlide builds upon jQuery's animation facility, so it is as portable across browsers as jQuery itself (that is, a lot!)

AJAX-ZOOM is a powerful image zoom & pan gallery plugin based on jQuery (JavaScript) and PHP. It is a completely packaged low cost solution1 to present high resolution images on the web. With over 250 options AJAX-ZOOM is very flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into any website - branding free! AJAX-ZOOM also doesn't require any browser plugins such as Flash, Java or Silverlight. It's all cross-browser javascript and PHP.

Smooth Div Scroll is a jQuery plugin that scrolls content horizontally left or right. Apart from many of the other scrolling plugins that have been written for jQuery, Smooth Div Scroll does not limit the scroling to distinct steps. As the name of the plugin hints, scrolling is smooth. There are no visible buttons or links since the scrolling is done using hotspots within the scrollable area or via autoscrolling. Unobtrusive and smooth is the key here.

16 unique transition effects
Simple clean & valid markup
Loads of settings to tweak
Built in directional and control navigation
Packed version only weighs 15kb
Supports linking images
Keyboard Navigation
HTML Captions
Free to use and abuse under the MIT license

Browser Support

Nivo Slider has been tested in the following browsers:

Internet Explorer v7+
Firefox v3+
Google Chrome v4+
Safari v4+
Opera v10+

The Brain Maps API is a lightweight multiresolution image viewer with customizable label overlays that lets you embed BrainMaps images in your own web pages with JavaScript, and that can also be used with your own multiresolution images. It has been designed to be small and fast, and to consume very little memory, yet still be very functional and extensible. The Brain Maps API is a free service, available for any web site that is free to consumers.

Pixen is an innovative graphics editor for the Mac. It's designed from top to bottom for pixel artists—people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games. But it's great for artists of all arenas: Pixen is like a very powerful MSPaint or a simpler, more agile Photoshop. And best of all, it's Free!

Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS.

An Image Overlay plugin for the jQuery JavaScript library. Allows you to display additional information in a translucent pane above an image that gracefully appears when a user hovers over the image. Support for the metadata plugin is included. Brought to you by Jon Neal of ferretarmy.com.

All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through.

Waaaaah! Waaaaaah! You hear that? That’s IE6 whining about how you should be using an obtuse “filter” attribute, causing all those nice, pretty pngs on your page to go whacky. Fortunately for you, we got just the thing to shut it up. Give it just the tiniest dose of our Unit PNG Fix and bask in the the glorious phosphoresence of your png images once again! While this is not the only png fix out there (in fact, it was inspired by Drew McLellan’s supersleight), here’s why it will be the last one you need to download

jCarousel is a jQuery plugin for controlling a list of items in horizontal or vertical order. The items, which can be static HTML content or loaded with (or without) AJAX, can be scrolled back and forth (with or without animation).

The Google Map Image Cutter is an application designed to take any image or digital photo and cut it into tiles which are displayed on a Google Map. Using this tool, large images can be published on the web in a format that allows the user to pan and zoom using the standard Google Maps interface. Although publishing large digital photos is the most obvious application, this technique can also be used for annotated maps of an area that are not to scale e.g. directions for how to get to the office.

prettyGallery another way to display galleries
by: Stéphane Caron

Once again, I wasn't satisifed with most of the gallery scripts out there. So I decided to build my own.

If you have any comment or ways to improve it, just leave me a comment!

Bellow you can see a demo of galleries.

The FIG is a gallery application that can be used by anyone to display multiple galleries of photos, artwork, or other pictures with descriptions. It requires no server-side language and will run on any web host. It is idealy suited for artists wi…

This amazing JavaScript image zoom can be installed in just 5 minutes. Using AJAX for zooming, it's the fastest, leanest, easiest zoomer available and has a 100% money back guarantee. Magic Zoom (previously LuckyZoom).

Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website. * Clean: Designed to compliment your content. * Fast: Smart image preloading. * Easy: Customizable without having to know CSS. * Rounded: Adjustable roun…

Media RSS is an open standard for syndicating multimedia content. It extends RSS 2.0 to provide additional information, such as richer thumbnail and image metadata. Media RSS allows Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) to understand the location o…

Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will…

If art that is celebrated in a certain era is a mirror to a society and its values, what do Bill Henson's photographs of naked 12- and 13-year-olds tell us about ours? writes Miranda Devine. - Sydney Morning Herald Online

This much-requested chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, originally written for this blog but later rolled out to the Panic website and used for screenshots, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website! Designe…

Lightbox 2 is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

My friend Richard recently came to me with a simple CSS question: Is there a way to make a background image resizeable? As in, fill the background of a web page edge-to-edge with an image, no matter the size of the browser window. Also, have it…

Creating a consistent interface for your users is a constant struggle for every application designer. Building consistency on the web is especially tough because the visual rendering differences across browsers and operating systems are wildly dif…

The carousel component manages a list of content (HTML LI elements within a UL) that can be displayed horizontally or vertically. The content can be scrolled back and forth with or without animation. The content can reference static HTML content o…

If you’ve been working with CSS even for just a little while, you surely bumped into some silly Internet Explorer bugs. One of the most annoying ones, at least for me, is the background flicker that happens when you hover a link that has an image …

This site converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

jCarousel Lite is a jQuery plugin that carries you on a carousel ride filled with images and HTML content. Put simply, you can navigate images and/or HTML in a carousel-style widget. It is super light weight, at about 2 KB in size, yet very flexib…

swfIR (swf Image Replacement) is here to solve some of the design limitations of the standard HTML image and its widely-accepted associated CSS values, while still supporting standards-based design concepts. Using the dark arts of JavaScript and F…

Monoslideshow is a Flash slideshow to view your images in a web page. It can be placed on every website, in whatever size you want and filled with whatever content you like. It's designed for maximum flexibility, whether you want to have a professional lo

Have you ever wondered how you create a seamless pattern in Photoshop? It’s easy and it’s fun. Let me show you how…

This technique is very versatile. Make sure you read the entire article to find out about the many different ways to implement the method. Image Placement vs. Image Replacement (FIR) What is FIR? FIR is a standards-compliant technique that uses stylesheet

During the “CSS: Between the (Style) Sheets” panel we presented at SXSW with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik, the question arose: is it possible to preload the hover (rollover) state of an image? It sure is, and you don’t need to write non-semantic jun

Viewing the images - Monitor Calibration In the production of individual prints, we go to considerable lengths to produce just the image the photographer was looking for. It is not easy to reproduce this on the Internet. The images are smaller and less de

They buried Kerry Packer six weeks ago, in a grave on an isolated property in the NSW bush. Perhaps his final, reclusive resting place reflected the loneliness he reputedly felt in life. A few hours ago, Packer, who bequeathed a $7 billion empire, was res