I have a div 200 x 200 px. I want to place a 50 x 50 px image right in the middle of the div.

How can it be done?

I am able to get it centered horizontally by using text-align: center for the div. But vertical alignment is the issue..

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36 Answers

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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; }
14

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.

7

another way is to create a table with valign, of course. This would work regardless of you knowing the div's height or not.

<div> <table width="100%" height="100%" align="center" valign="center"> <tr><td> <img src="foo.jpg" alt="foo" /> </td></tr> </table> </div>

but you should always stick to just css whenever possible.

6

I would set your larger div with position:relative; then for your image do this:

img.classname{ position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; margin-top:-25px; margin-left:-25px; }

This only works because you know the dimensions of both the image and the containing div. This will also let you have other items within the containing div... where solutions like using line-height will not.

EDIT: Note... your margins are negative half of the size of the image.

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This works correctly:

display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto

else try this if the above only gives you horizontal centering:

.outerContainer { position: relative; } .innerContainer { width: 50px; //your image/element width here height: 50px; //your image/element height here overflow: auto; margin: auto; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; }
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Use Flexbox:

.outerDiv { display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; /* Centering y-axis */ align-items :center; /* Centering x-axis */ }
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here's another method to center everything within anything.

Working Fiddle

HTML: (simple as ever)

<div> <div> /*this can be an img, span, or everything else*/ I'm the Content </div> </div>

CSS:

.Container { text-align: center; } .Container:before { content: ''; height: 100%; display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; } .Content { display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; }

Benefits

The Container and Content height are unknown.

Centering without specific negative margin, without setting the line-height (so it works well with multiple line of text) and without a script, also Works great with CSS transitions.

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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*/ }
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I've found that Valamas' and Lepu's answers above are the most straightforward answers that deal with images of unknown size, or of known size that you'd rather not hard-code into your CSS. I just have a few small tweaks: remove irrelevant styles, size it to 200px to match the question, and add max-height/max-width to handle images that may be too large.

div.image-thumbnail { width: 200px; height: 200px; line-height: 200px; text-align: center; } div.image-thumbnail img { vertical-align: middle; max-height: 200px; max-width: 200px; }
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in the div

style="text-align:center; line-height:200px"
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Vertical-align is one of the most misused css styles. It doesn't work how you might expect on elements that are not td's or css "display: table-cell".

This is a very good post on the matter.

The most common methods to acheive what you're looking for are:

  • padding top/bottom
  • position absolute
  • line-height

In CSS do it as:

img { display:table-cell; vertical-align:middle; margin:auto; }
3

We can easily achieve this using flex. no need for background-image.

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> #image-wrapper{ width:500px; height:500px; border:1px solid #333; display:flex; justify-content:center; align-items:center; } </style> </head> <body> <div> <img src=""> </div> </body> </html>

@sleepy You can easily do this using the following attributes:

#content { display: flex; align-items: center; width: 200px; height: 200px; border: 1px solid red; } #myImage { display: block; width: 50px; height: 50px; margin: auto; border: 1px solid yellow; }
<div> <img src=""> </div>

References: W3

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Typically, I'll set the line-height to be 200px. Usually does the trick.

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> <div> <a href="Painting/Details/2"> <img src="/Content/Images/Paintings/Thumbnail/painting_00002.jpg" /> </a> </div> <div> ... </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; }

This works for me :

<body> <table> <tr><td> <img src="foo.png" /> </td></tr> </table> </body> <style type="text/css"> html, body { height: 100%; } #table-foo { width: 100%; height: 100%; text-align: center; vertical-align: middle; } #table-foo img { display: block; margin: 0 auto; } </style>

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="" 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;
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This is an old solution but browser market shares have advanced enough that you may be able to get by without the IE hack part of it if you are not concerned about degrading for IE7. This works when you know the dimensions of the outer container but may or may not know the dimensions of the inner image.

.parent { display: table; height: 200px; /* can be percentages, too, like 100% */ width: 200px; /* can be percentages, too, like 100% */ } .child { display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle; margin: 0 auto; } 
 <div> <div> <img src="foo.png" alt="bar" /> </div> </div>

easy

img { transform: translate(50%,50%); }
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You can set position of image is align center horizontal by this

#imageId { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right:auto; }
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I've been trying to get an image to be centered vertically and horizontally within a circle shape using hmtl and css.

After combining several points from this thread, here's what I came up with: jsFiddle

Here's another example of this within a three column layout: jsFiddle

CSS:

#circle { width: 100px; height: 100px; background: #A7A9AB; -moz-border-radius: 50px; -webkit-border-radius: 50px; border-radius: 50px; margin: 0 auto; position: relative; } .images { position: absolute; margin: auto; top: 0; left: 0; right: 0; bottom: 0; }

HTML:

<div> <img src="" /> </div>

You can center an image horizontally and vertically with the code below (works in IE/FF). It will put the top edge of the image at exactly 50% of the browser height, and the margin-top(pulling half the height of the image up) will center it perfectly.

<style type="text/css"> #middle {position: absolute; top: 50%;} /* for explorer only*/ #middle[id] {vertical-align: middle; width: 100%;} #inner {position: relative; top: -50%} /* for explorer only */ </style> <body> <div> <div align="center"> /* the number will be half the height of your image, so for example if the height is 500px then you will put 250px for the margin-top */ <img src="..." height="..." width="..." /> </div> </div> </body>

I love jumping on old bandwagons!

Here's a 2015 update to this answer. I started using CSS3 transform to do my dirty work for positioning. This allows you to not have to make any extra HTML, you don't have to do math (finding half-widths of things) you can use it on any element!

Here's an example (with fiddle at the end). Your HTML:

<div> <div> </div> </div>

With accompanying CSS:

.bigDiv { width:200px; height:200px; background-color:#efefef; position:relative; } .smallDiv { width:50px; height:50px; background-color:#cc0000; position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; transform:translate(-50%, -50%); }

What I do a lot these days is I will give a class to things I want centered and just re-use that class every time. For example:

<div> <div> </div> </div>

css

.bigDiv { width:200px; height:200px; background-color:#efefef; position:relative; } .smallDiv { width:50px; height:50px; background-color:#cc0000; } .centerThis { position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; transform:translate(-50%, -50%); }

This way, I will always be able to center something in it's container. You just have to make sure that the thing you want centered is in a container that has a position defined.

Here's a fiddle

BTW: This works for centering BIGGER divs inside SMALLER divs as well.

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div { position: absolute; border: 3px solid green; width: 200px; height: 200px; } img { position: relative; border: 3px solid red; width: 50px; height: 50px; } .center { top: 50%; left: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, -50%); -ms-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); /* IE 9 */ -webkit-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */ }
<div> <img src="" /> </div>

Related: Center a image

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; }

Use positioning. The following worked for me:

div{ display:block; overflow:hidden; width: 200px; height: 200px; position: relative; } div img{ width: 50px; height: 50px; top: 50%; left: 50%; bottom: 50%; right: 50%; position: absolute; }

Simply set image margin auto as shown below.

img{ margin:auto; width:50%; height:auto; }

Check these example

.container { height: 200px; width: 200px; float:left; position:relative; } .children-with-img { position: absolute; width:50px; height:50px; left:50%; top:50%; transform:translate(-50%); }
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If you know the size of the parent div and the image, you can just use absolute positioning.

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