Responsive Masonry Layout using only CSS

Introduction #

First of all let’s talk what is a masonry layout. Well Masonry means “craft of building a structure with brick, stone, or similar material” - According to google definition.

Well if you ask me I’ll say creating responsive and beautiful layouts in HTML with different sizes of elements.

In this article we are going to create a Image Gallery website using masonry layout which will be pretty and responsive.

Let’s get started! #

Before learning to create masonry layouts let’s learn how to make images responsive using CSS only.

Making images responsive #

Let’s assume we have image in our website,

<img
  class="image"
  src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693761935441-ad0ffad6905b?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDF8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
/>

Now to make this image responsive we have to use only two lines of css.

img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height: auto;
}

just by using these two CSS lines we can make every image in our responsive. No matter what device width will get the max-width of image will always stay 100% and we added height: auto so when width changes with device width it also updates the height by itself.

Let’s create masonry layout #

It’s time we create masonry layout. First of all let’s add some images in our HTML

<div class="image-gallery">
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693761935441-ad0ffad6905b?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDF8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1694009606218-eb46476e6300?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDR8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693165074962-ae564d6b16ee?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDJ8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693754079764-d90b63861dd3?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDZ8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693057205752-f7cabeaff629?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDl8NnNNVmpUTFNrZVF8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
  <div class="image-card">
    <img
      src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1693928626612-629e0b697ce1?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHx0b3BpYy1mZWVkfDEyfDZzTVZqVExTa2VRfHxlbnwwfHx8fHw%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60"
      alt="ShowCaseGallery"
    />
  </div>
</div>

Here I’ve added bunch of images from unsplash and all of them have different heights and widths.

Currently the images looks like this in straight line,

Now we want images to be in row and also we want them to update as the device width changes.

We want layout to look something like this,

So we’ll define number of columns to display in page, Let’s write some css to make things looks beautiful.

/* Parent container of .image-card */
.image-gallery {
  columns: 3;
  column-gap: 16px;
  margin: 1rem;
}

So we defined 3 columns on page and we also gave column-gap: 16px so that it looks cleaner with bit of space around every .image-card we also added margin: 1rem so add some spacing around the entire container.

Let’s target our .image-card in CSS and minor CSS.

.image-card {
  position: relative;
  margin-bottom: 16px;
}

Our masonry layout is ready :D It’s time to make it responsive with some @media queries Check out this post to learn more about @media queries

@media screen and (max-width: 1200px) {
  .image-gallery {
    columns: 3;
  }
}

@media screen and (max-width: 900px) {
  .image-gallery {
    columns: 2;
  }
}

@media screen and (max-width: 500px) {
  .image-gallery {
    columns: 1;
  }
}

And we’re done!

Wrapping up #

It’s is pretty basic to create masonry layout using only CSS and still you can spice it up by implementing Javascript and more feature.