html - Fill a div with an image respecting aspect ratio

Question

Is it possible to fill a div with an image such that at least one image dimension is 100% and the other dimension is either wider or equal size as the div, whilst respecting the image's aspect ratio.

An example could use the classes wide and tall like this:

<div class="tall">
  <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/Klaproos.jpg/266px-Klaproos.jpg"/>
</div>

<div class="wide">
  <img src="https://groenevrijdag.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/klaproos2.jpg"/>
</div>

div {
  width: 400px; height: 400px;
  display: block;
  overflow: hidden;
  border-radius: 50%;
  display: inline-block;
}
div.tall img { width: 100%;  margin-top: -50%; }
div.wide img { height: 100%; margin-left: -50%; }

https://jsfiddle.net/7tuod6vu/

I'm looking for a pure HTML+CSS solution which works for responsive rectangular (not necessarily square) divs. For this particular reason, Javascript would be a pain as one would need to determine whether the width or height should be 100% on every resize. Server side wouldn't even be an option.

Does a pure HTML+CSS solution exist for this?

EDIT Should have been clear about this from the beginning, sorry about that :( I'm not looking for the background-image solution, since it does not allow base64-inhtml representation of images. Moreover, I think background-image's are semantically different from <img>s.

Answer 1

Consider using the CSS object-fit property.

5.5. Sizing Objects: the object-fit property

The object-fit property specifies how the contents of a replaced element should be fitted to the box established by its used height and width.

Here are two of the values:

• cover

  The replaced content is sized to maintain its aspect ratio while filling the element's entire content box.

• contain

  The replaced content is sized to maintain its aspect ratio while fitting within the element's content box.

So, with cover the image retains its aspect ratio and covers all available space. Of course, this means that much of an image may be cropped off-screen.

With contain the aspect ratio is also maintained, but the image scales to fit within the box. This means that an image may have whitespace on the left and right, or top and bottom.

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Browser Compatibility

As of this writing, object-fit is not supported by Internet Explorer. For a workaround see:

• Neat trick for CSS object-fit fallback on Edge (and other browsers)
• fitie - An object-fit polyfill for Internet Explorer
• object-fit-images - Adds support for object-fit on IE9, IE10, IE11, Edge and other old browsers
• Polyfill (mostly IE) for CSS object-fit property to fill-in/fit-in images into containers.

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More information

• MDN object-fit property
• CSS-Tricks object-fit property
• object-fit browser support @ caniuse.com