CSS:Image overlay caption

Intro

There are 2 image overlay caption related tutorials i made “Making image captions using jQuery” and“Making A Cool Thumbnail Effect With Zoom And Sliding Captions”. Feel free to check them out, they’re great 

Both of them have some cool effect made with jQuery, but yesterday a reader (hi Goodluck) asked me how to have the captions shown by default without jQuery effects. So i realized i don’t have a tutorial explaining how to make a simple overlay image caption and here we are. Enjoy.

How it looks

HTML

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1. <!-- wrapper div -->  
2. <div class='wrapper'>  
3.     <!-- image -->  
4.     <img src='wolf.jpg' />  
5.     <!-- description div -->  
6.     <div class='description'>  
7.         <!-- description content -->  
8.         <p class='description_content'>The pack, the basic...</p>  
9.         <!-- end description content -->  
10.     </div>  
11.     <!-- end description div -->  
12. </div>  
13. <!-- end wrapper div -->  

CSS

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1. div.wrapper{  
2.     float:left; /* important */  
3.     position:relative; /* important(so we can absolutely position the description div */  
4. }  
5. div.description{  
6.     position:absolute; /* absolute position (so we can position it where we want)*/  
7.     bottombottom:0px; /* position will be on bottom */  
8.     left:0px;  
9.     width:100%;  
10.     /* styling bellow */  
11.     background-color:black;  
12.     font-family: 'tahoma';  
13.     font-size:15px;  
14.     color:white;  
15.     opacity:0.6; /* transparency */  
16.     filter:alpha(opacity=60); /* IE transparency */  
17. }  
18. p.description_content{  
19.     padding:10px;  
20.     margin:0px;  
21. }  

That’s it

And we have a nice transparent overlay image caption. If you don’t like that the text is also transparent then i can suggest you to use a transparent PNG image 1px wide and 1px tall as the background of the .description and remove the CSS opacity, or you can use javascript to make a transparent mask and on top of it show the caption text. If you like to see a tutorial on different ways to achieve that, let me know and i’ll see what i can do