CSS Image size, how to fill, but not stretch?

I have an image, and I want to set it a specific width and height (in pixels)

But If I set width and height using css (width:150px; height:100px), image will be stretched, and It may be ugly.

How to Fill images to a specific size using CSS, and not stretching it?

Example of fill and stretching image:

Original Image:

Stretched Image:

Filled Image:

Please note that in the Filled image example above: first, image is resized to 150x255 (maintained aspect ratio), and then, it cropped to 150x100.

Solution 1:

You can use the css property object-fit.

.cover {
  object-fit: cover;
  width: 50px;
  height: 100px;
}

<img src="http://i.stack.imgur.com/2OrtT.jpg" class="cover" width="242" height="363" />

See example here

There's a polyfill for IE: https://github.com/anselmh/object-fit

Solution 2:

If you want to use the image as a CSS background, there is an elegant solution. Simply use cover or contain in the background-size CSS3 property.

.container {
  width: 150px;
  height: 100px;
  background-image: url("http://i.stack.imgur.com/2OrtT.jpg");
  background-size: cover;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: 50% 50%;
}

<div class="container"></div>​

While cover will give you a scaled up image, contain will give you a scaled down image. Both will preserve the pixel aspect ratio.

http://jsfiddle.net/uTHqs/ (using cover)

http://jsfiddle.net/HZ2FT/ (using contain)

This approach has the advantage of being friendly to Retina displays as per Thomas Fuchs' quick guide.

It's worth mentioning that browser support for both attributes excludes IE6-8.