How do I position one image on top of another in HTML?

I'm a beginner at rails programming, attempting to show many images on a page. Some images are to lay on top of others. To make it simple, say I want a blue square, with a red square in the upper right corner of the blue square (but not tight in the corner). I am trying to avoid compositing (with ImageMagick and similar) due to performance issues.

I just want to position overlapping images relative to one another.

As a more difficult example, imagine an odometer placed inside a larger image. For six digits, I would need to composite a million different images, or do it all on the fly, where all that is needed is to place the six images on top of the other one.

Ok, after some time, here's what I landed on:

.parent {
  position: relative;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
}
.image1 {
  position: relative;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  border: 1px red solid;
}
.image2 {
  position: absolute;
  top: 30px;
  left: 30px;
  border: 1px green solid;
}

<div class="parent">
  <img class="image1" src="https://via.placeholder.com/50" />
  <img class="image2" src="https://via.placeholder.com/100" />
</div>

As the simplest solution. That is:

Create a relative div that is placed in the flow of the page; place the base image first as relative so that the div knows how big it should be; place the overlays as absolutes relative to the upper left of the first image. The trick is to get the relatives and absolutes correct.

This is a barebones look at what I've done to float one image over another.

img {
  position: absolute;
  top: 25px;
  left: 25px;
}
.imgA1 {
  z-index: 1;
}
.imgB1 {
  z-index: 3;
}

<img class="imgA1" src="https://via.placeholder.com/200/333333">
<img class="imgB1" src="https://via.placeholder.com/100">

Source

Here's code that may give you ideas:

<style>
.containerdiv { float: left; position: relative; } 
.cornerimage { position: absolute; top: 0; right: 0; } 
</style>

<div class="containerdiv">
    <img border="0" src="https://www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_272x92dp.png" alt=""">
    <img class="cornerimage" border="0" src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" alt="">
<div>

JSFiddle

I suspect that Espo's solution may be inconvenient because it requires you to position both images absolutely. You may want the first one to position itself in the flow.

Usually, there is a natural way to do that is CSS. You put position: relative on the container element, and then absolutely position children inside it. Unfortunately, you cannot put one image inside another. That's why I needed container div. Notice that I made it a float to make it autofit to its contents. Making it display: inline-block should theoretically work as well, but browser support is poor there.

EDIT: I deleted size attributes from the images to illustrate my point better. If you want the container image to have its default sizes and you don't know the size beforehand, you cannot use the background trick. If you do, it is a better way to go.

One issue I noticed that could cause errors is that in rrichter's answer, the code below:

<img src="b.jpg" style="position: absolute; top: 30; left: 70;"/>

should include the px units within the style eg.

<img src="b.jpg" style="position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 70px;"/>

Other than that, the answer worked fine. Thanks.

You can absolutely position pseudo elements relative to their parent element.

This gives you two extra layers to play with for every element - so positioning one image on top of another becomes easy - with minimal and semantic markup (no empty divs etc).

markup:

<div class="overlap"></div>

css:

.overlap
{
    width: 100px;
    height: 100px;
    position: relative;
    background-color: blue;
}
.overlap:after
{
    content: '';
    position: absolute;
    width: 20px;
    height: 20px;
    top: 5px;
    left: 5px;
    background-color: red;
}

Here's a LIVE DEMO