The HTML `picture` tag
Discover the basics of working with images and the HTML `picture` tag, and how to make them responsive
HTML gives us the picture
tag, which does a very similar job of the srcset
attribute of an img
tag, and the differences are very subtle.
You use picture
when instead of just serving a smaller version of a file, you completely want to change it. Or serve a different image format.
The best use case I found is when serving a WebP image, which is a format still not widely supported. In the picture
tag you specify a list of images, and they will be used in order, so in the next example, browsers that support WebP will use the first image, and fallback to JPG if not:
<picture>
<source type="image/webp" srcset="image.webp">
<img src="image.jpg" alt="An image">
</picture>
The
source
tag defines one (or more) formats for the images. Theimg
tag is the fallback in case the browser is very old and does not support thepicture
tag.
In the source
tag inside picture
you can add a media
attribute to set media queries.
The example that follows kind of works like the above example with srcset
:
<picture>
<source media="(min-width: 500w)" srcset="dog-500.png" sizes="100vw">
<source media="(min-width: 800w)" srcset="dog-800.png" sizes="100vw">
<source media="(min-width: 1000w)" srcset="dog-1000.png" sizes="800px">
<source media="(min-width: 1400w)" srcset="dog-1400.png" sizes="800px">
<img src="dog.png" alt="A dog image">
</picture>
But that’s not its use case, because as you can see it’s much more verbose.
The picture
tag is recent but is now supported by all the major browsers except Opera Mini and IE (all versions).
I wrote 17 books to help you become a better developer, download them all at $0 cost by joining my newsletter
JOIN MY CODING BOOTCAMP, an amazing cohort course that will be a huge step up in your coding career - covering React, Next.js - next edition February 2025