How to make an image center (vertically & horizontally) inside a bigger div [duplicate]

Answer 1

Personally, I'd place it as the background image within the div, the CSS for that being:

#demo {
    background: url(bg_apple_little.gif) no-repeat center center;
    height: 200px;
    width: 200px;
}

(Assumes a div with id="demo" as you are already specifying height and width adding a background shouldn't be an issue)

Let the browser take the strain.

Answer 2

Working in old browsers (IE >= 8)

Absolute position in combination with automatic margin permits to center an element horizontally and vertically. The element position could be based on a parent element position using relative positioning. View Result

img {
    position: absolute;
    margin: auto;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
}

Answer 3

I have a gallery of images for which I don't know the exact heights or widths of images beforhand, I just know that they are smaller than the div in which they are going to be contained.

By doing a combination of line-height settings on the container and using vertical-align:middle on the image element, I finally got it to work on FF 3.5, Safari 4.0 and IE7.0 using the following HTML markup and the following CSS.

The HTML Markup

<div id="gallery">
    <div class="painting">
        <a href="Painting/Details/2">
            <img src="/Content/Images/Paintings/Thumbnail/painting_00002.jpg" />
        </a>
    </div>
    <div class="painting">
        ...
    </div>
    ...
 </div>

The CSS

div.painting
{
    float:left;

    height:138px; /* fixed dimensions */
    width: 138px;

    border: solid 1px white;
    background-color:#F5F5F5;


    line-height:138px;    
    text-align:center;

}

    div.painting a img
    {
        border:none;
        vertical-align:middle;

    }

Answer 4

thanks to everyone else for the clues.

I used this method

div.image-thumbnail
{
    width: 85px;
    height: 85px;
    line-height: 85px;
    display: inline-block;
    text-align: center;
}
div.image-thumbnail img
{
    vertical-align: middle;
}

Answer 5

Another way (not mentioned here yet) is with Flexbox.

Just set the following rules on the container div:

display: flex;
justify-content: center; /* align horizontal */
align-items: center; /* align vertical */

FIDDLE

div {
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  border: 1px solid green;
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  /* align horizontal */
  align-items: center;
  /* align vertical */
}

<div>
  <img src="http://lorempixel.com/50/50/food" alt="" />
</div>

A good place to start with Flexbox to see some of it's features and get syntax for maximum browser support is flexyboxes

Also, browser support nowadays is quite good: caniuse

For cross-browser compatibility for display: flex and align-items, you can use the following:

display: -webkit-box;
display: -webkit-flex;
display: -moz-box;
display: -ms-flexbox;
display: flex;
-webkit-flex-align: center;
-ms-flex-align: center;
-webkit-align-items: center;
align-items: center;

Answer 6

This is coming a bit late, but here's a solution I use to vertical align elements within a parent div.

This is useful for when you know the size of the container div, but not that of the contained image. (this is frequently the case when working with lightboxes or image carousels).

Here's the styling you should try:

 container div
 {
   display:table-cell;
   vertical-align:middle;

   height:200px;
   width:200px;
 }

 img
 {
   /*Apply any styling here*/        
 }