FAQ: Sizing Elements - Scaling Background Images

This community-built FAQ covers the “Scaling Background Images” exercise from the lesson “Sizing Elements”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development

Learn Responsive Design

FAQs on the exercise Scaling Background Images

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Don’t see any change to the background image when I add background-size: cover

In the ‘Scaling Background Images’ portion of the “Learn Responsive Design” lesson found here, the lesson teaches about setting the CSS property background-size to cover. It explains that this will cause the image to fill the entire background of the element all while keeping its aspect ratio. It also says that if the image is bigger than the element, part of the image will be cut off. What would happen if the image were smaller than the element? Would it be stretch (proportionately) to fill the element and look pixelated or would it just be displayed at its full size but not fill the entire background?

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From the MDN docs,

cover Scales the image as large as possible to fill the container, stretching the image if necessary

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the exercise didn’t show anything that changed. didn’t show how it works…

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Hello All,

So I have a question relation to scaling background images. I learnt that it is best practice to put all content like images and text in to a html file as html is the structure of a webpage and then the page is styled with a linked css. If an image is added/linked in a html file then how is it styled/ scaled in css? As it would require the image to be removed from the html and then added/ linked in the css with background-image: url();

I am just wanting to know what is the best practice in this case, add/ link images in the css or html?

I have also asked this question in a recent project challenge here

When your image is just decorative like a wall paper, best practice is to put it in the CSS file as a background image.

If you want to adjust a “<“img”>” in your HTML file, just add an ID to this , you’ll have full control on it via the CSS by using the right selector.

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what does a ‘repeating image’ mean? and how does background-repeat: no-repeat; work?

background-repeat - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

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