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.