Background images on images

Here’s a simple trick that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.

Say you have a series of thumbnails of a known size. You want to give them a fancy border effect but don’t want to waste a lot of time in Photoshop applying it to every one.

The simple answer is to create an image—larger than the original—that contains the border and its background. Then you simply apply that image as a background image with CSS (give it a “center center” position and sufficient padding) and bob’s your uncle.