Question

How do I evenly space out my thumbnails?

Asked by: furio13

Hello!

This is a really big newbie question but I am trying to figure out something for a thumbnail gallery that's been bugging me.

Lets say I have a gallery that is contained within a div that has a specified width. I am trying to get the thumbnails evenly spaced out. Now, I know there are several ways to approach this. The method I usually use is to add margin-right to each thumbnail except for the thumbnail on the far right (I use a class that sets "margin-right" to 0).

However, this approach is getting a little annoying especially when I keep changing the thumbnails so the thumb on the far right is not always the same.

Can someone please let me know if there is a better way to approach this. I want to make sure that the thumbnails on the far right and the far left butt-up to the edge of the container.

Thanks!

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Asked On
2009-10-13 at 07:07:19ID24807773
Tags

CSS

,

HTML

,

image gallery

,

margin

Topics

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

,

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

,

Web Images

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
15

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Answers

 

by: LZ1Posted on 2009-10-13 at 07:52:18ID: 25560580

You could place a div in between each thumbnail with a specified width.  It's a little on the code heavy side as it's adding additional lines to yoru code, however I've used it before and it's worked great.

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-10-13 at 08:07:19ID: 25560782

Thanks for the reply LZ1.

However, I think your suggestion is probably as much work as my method where I add a class to the thumbnails on the far right. As I change the thumbnails, I will always have to make sure the extra divs are in the right spot. And yeah, I was hoping to avoid the extra mark-up.

Thanks for the help though. If anyone else has any suggestions, I'm still open to anything.

 

by: KravimirPosted on 2009-10-13 at 10:36:05ID: 25562224

It sounds like they're left aligned. Have you considered centering them?

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-10-13 at 10:41:55ID: 25562278

Sorry, I guess I should have provided more details.

Right now, I have all my thumbnails in an unordered list and each <li> is  floating "left" with a margin-right of 20px (except on the far right thumbnail).

 

by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-10-16 at 06:37:18ID: 25589360

Make sure the <li> elements are styled with "display:block; overflow:hidden; float:left; clear:none;"
Also take account of the box-model (margin+padding+border= total width of element)
If you have border set to the elements, substract it from the margin or the padding;

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-10-16 at 06:50:22ID: 25589483

Thanks for the reply qaljimmy.

I believe I have already taken most of those things into consideration. The problem is using "margin-right" with the thumbnails to space them out but have the far right thumbnail butt-up on the right side with the edge of the container.

Right now, the "margin-right" on the far right thumbnail is causing the thumbnail to move to the next line.

 

by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:03:58ID: 25589647

Might be a long shot, but does this problem only appear in IE?

 

by: KravimirPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:20:57ID: 25589810

Have you considered reducing the right margin by half and adding a left margin of that new amount?

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-10-16 at 07:25:51ID: 25589845

Thanks for the replies guys.

qaljimmy:
No, its happening on any browser I'm using (I mainly use Firefox 3)

Kravimir:
I thought about that too but then I would have 10px margin left on the far left thumb and 10px margin right on the far right thumb. I was hoping to have the edges of the thumbs on either side lined up with the edge of the container without spaces.

 

by: KravimirPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:39:45ID: 25589970

Oh, right. I forgot you mentioned that detail. Try this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">/* <![CDATA[ */
 
div.container {
  width: 940px;
  background: #D1D1D1;
  padding: 20px 0;
  overflow: hidden; /* to contain the floats */
}
 
ul.thumnails {
  margin: 0 -10px;
  padding: 0;
  list-style-type: none;
  position: relative;
  width: 960px;
}
 
ul.thumnails li {
  width: 220px;
  float: left;
  margin: 0 10px;
  display: inline; /* IE6 fix */
  background: #7A7A7A;
}
 
/* ]]> */</style>
</head>
<body>
 
 
<div class="container">
 
<ul class="thumnails">
  <li>Thumbnail</li>
  <li>Thumbnail</li>
  <li>Thumbnail</li>
  <li>Thumbnail</li>
</ul>
 
 
</div>
 
 
</body>
</html>

                                              
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by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:52:22ID: 25590100

Even simpler approach

<style>
 
.container {list-style-type:none; margin:10px auto; padding:50px 0px; width:940px; background-color:#ccc; display:block; overflow:hidden;}
.container .thumb {list-style-type:none; padding:0px; margin:0px 20px 0px 0px; float:left; width:220px; height:150px; display:block; overflow:hidden; background-color:#999; }
.container .last {margin-right:0px;}
</style>
<ul class="container">
	<li class="thumb">Thumbnail</li>
	<li class="thumb">Thumbnail</li>
	<li class="thumb">Thumbnail</li>
	<li class="thumb last">Thumbnail</li>
</ul>

                                              
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by: KravimirPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:56:44ID: 25590147

> Even simpler approach

True. Since the container has a fixed width and the thumbnails are fixed width, it's easy to tell which one will be the last on a row.

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-10-16 at 08:34:47ID: 25590502

Thanks again for the reply guys.

Kravimir:
I'm going to give your suggestion a try and I'll let you know how it goes.

qaljimmy:
I appreciate the help but as I mentioned in my question, I wanted to avoid using a different class for the far right thumbnail. I am using some Jquery to categorize my thumbnails so when someone selects a particular category, some of the thumbnails are removed from the list. Because of this, the far right thumbnail won't always be the same.

 

by: qaljimmyPosted on 2009-10-16 at 15:58:05ID: 25593949

In that case, using jQuery after you remove the thumbnails you don't want, you can also generate an additional class name for the last element in the thumbnail array/object. Thus able to use custom CSS property.

 

by: furio13Posted on 2009-11-03 at 13:29:15ID: 31640535

Thanks.

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