The Ultimate Guide to CSS Sprite Images
Sprite Images Introduction
In recent years, so many social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are growing like crazy.
With such growth comes, the need to optimize and reduce the size of server requests.
As we can see Facebook has more than 1 billion users where they have multiple images, icons, and similar content, and they require multiple server requests.
Sprite images have such a theory where you get the image once, shift it around, and show only part of it.
So instead of showing one image for your profile, your friend’s profile, and similarly individual. Sprite images allow you to use a single image instead.
This means showing an individual’s different image increases server requests while Sprite images need only a single server request.
Let’s see the example of involving flags in sprite images.
You can use this link Sprite Me to generate sprite images.
Link:https://cdn-media-1.freecodecamp.org/images/1*pc6EbbKjoFzSbVCMiA8OOQ.png
How does Sprite Images Work?
When you need to use it in your project, simply add an empty div with the required width and height in your HTML wherever you need to add images.
Once you are done with the HTML code, remember to add a standard class for all divs and an individual class or id for each div, so you can scale accordingly where the same image is going to load.
With the use of a common class given for each div, add the background image as a sprite image.
The next step is to add background-size as actual pixel size, where this parameter helps to zoom in to meet the actual point of the image visible in that area.
Conclusion
It is very useful when you really need to reduce multiple HTTPS server requests for your common images like profile icons, button icons, etc.
