How to go up a level in the src path of a URL in HTML?

Question

I am storing style sheets in {root}/styles while images in {root}/images for a website. How do I give the path in the style sheets to go look in the images directory for the specified images?

e.g. In background-image: url('/images/bg.png');

Answer 1

Use .. to indicate the parent directory:

background-image: url('../images/bg.png');

Answer 2

Use ../:

background-image: url('../images/bg.png');

You can use that as often as you want, e.g. ../../images/ or even at different positions, e.g. ../images/../images/../images/ (same as ../images/ of course)

Answer 3

Here is all you need to know about relative file paths:

• Starting with / returns to the root directory and starts there

• Starting with ../ moves one directory backward and starts there

• Starting with ../../ moves two directories backward and starts there (and so on...)

• To move forward, just start with the first sub directory and keep moving forward.

Click here for more details!

Answer 4

In Chrome when you load a website from some HTTP server both absolute paths (e.g. /images/sth.png) and relative paths to some upper level directory (e.g. ../images/sth.png) work.

But!

When you load (in Chrome!) a HTML document from local filesystem you cannot access directories above current directory. I.e. you cannot access ../something/something.sth and changing relative path to absolute or anything else won't help.

Answer 5

Supposing you have the following file structure:

-css
  --index.css
-images
  --image1.png
  --image2.png
  --image3.png

In CSS you can access image1, for example, using the line ../images/image1.png.

NOTE: If you are using Chrome, it may doesn't work and you will get an error that the file could not be found. I had the same problem, so I just deleted the entire cache history from chrome and it worked.