Display Image On Text Link Hover CSS Only

Question

I have a text link. When the user hovers over the text link, I want an image to be displayed elsewhere on the page. I want to do this using css. I thought it could be done simply with a single line of code in the link like an onmouseover but it seems that requires other code elsewhere on the page.

I tried using the a:hover with the picture I want to show as a background-image but I don't think it can be manipulated to display in full instead of being clipped down to the size of the text link.

I see hundreds of results when I try to search for this but none of them are what I want. The closest thing I found was this.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/item/css-image-gallery/

But that's working with hovering over thumbnail images. I just want the user to hover over a single text link to have an image show on the page somewhere else. I found that gallery from this thread: Pop up image css link on hover

I don't want to deal with whatever that jquery is or too much scripts because I'm more familiar with css. Does anyone know of a simple way to do this or is there still no way, not even with all the changes made for css3?

Thanks!

Trustless

Answer 1

CSS isn't going to be able to call other elements like that, you'll need to use JavaScript to reach beyond a child or sibling selector.

You could try something like this:

<a>Some Link
<div><img src="/you/image" /></div>
</a>

then...

a>div { display: none; }
a:hover>div { display: block; }

Vertumnus

Ah okay I kind of see what you mean with that. That it would be hidden but then displayed when I hover over the link because they're linked with the ">". I'll try and see what happens, thanks! – Trustless

Awesome, I got it to work! Only change I made was setting the hover div to inline since block made it shift the links next to it after you were done hovering and then in the html part I gave the div a class that I set an absolute position for so the image in the div would show up where I wanted it to on the page. It works exactly how I wanted it to, thank you so much!!! – Trustless

Oh I also exchanged a>div for a<img same with hover so that I could just use the image without the anchor tag instead of having a div in there. It worked fine the other way in browsers but the links were lined up weird on my mobile device. Now they all match up. Thanks again! – Trustless

@fluidbyte, I have tried to apply this solution in the style attribute of <ul> as this: style="a>div { display: none; }; a:hover>div { display: block; }" and it does not work. – Dimarco

Answer 2

It can be done using CSS alone. It works perfect on my machine in Firefox, Chrome and Opera browser under Ubuntu 12.04.

CSS :

.hover_img a { position:relative; }
.hover_img a span { position:absolute; display:none; z-index:99; }
.hover_img a:hover span { display:block; }

HTML :

<div class="hover_img">
     <a href="#">Show Image<span><img src="images/01.png" alt="image" height="100" /></span></a>
</div>

Just

This awesome, and does EXACTLY what I want it to, thank you! But, I'm running into an issue when it's inside of a table, it won't show the full size of the image because the size of the <td> which is undefined, but I'm assuming is smaller, because of the link that corresponds to the image. Do you have any way around this? Is there a way for the image to "float" essentially above the table, and not necessarily be inside of the table? – Septavalent

add these lines to .hover_img a:hover span css... height: 200px; width: 200px; overflow: visible; and it shows what @Spartacus38 wanted – Zindman

This should be marked as a solution. Working very well and fast – Portaltoportal

For an "in-line" (e.g. within a sentence) mouseover image link, replace "div" with "span" in the answer, above. – Ohl

Answer 3

I did something like that:

HTML:

<p class='parent'>text text text</p>
<img class='child' src='idk.png'>

CSS:

.child {
    visibility: hidden;
}

.parent:hover .child {
    visibility: visible;
}

Carrillo

Answer 4

add

.hover_img a:hover span {
    display: block;
    width: 350px;
}

to show hover image full size in table change 350 to your size.

Bort

Answer 5

From w3 schools:

<style>
/* Tooltip container */
.tooltip {
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
  border-bottom: 1px dotted black; /* If you want dots under the hoverable text */
}

/* Tooltip text */
.tooltip .tooltiptext {
  visibility: hidden;
  width: 120px;
  background-color: black;
  color: #fff;
  text-align: center;
  padding: 5px 0;
  border-radius: 6px;

  /* Position the tooltip text - see examples below! */
  position: absolute;
  z-index: 1;
}

/* Show the tooltip text when you mouse over the tooltip container */
.tooltip:hover .tooltiptext {
  visibility: visible;
}
</style>

<div class="tooltip">Hover over me
  <img src="/pathtoimage" class="tooltiptext">
</div>

Sounds like about what you want

Inwrought

Answer 6

It is not possible to do this with just CSS alone, you will need to use Javascript.

<img src="default_image.jpg" id="image" width="100" height="100" alt="" />


<a href="page.html" onmouseover="document.images['image'].src='mouseover.jpg';" onmouseout="document.images['image'].src='default_image.jpg';"/>Text</a>

Seringa