jQuery Preload CSS Images

This is a useful way of pre-loading css images before rendering JavaScript/jQuery animation for example. This Script is a little jQuery plugin that caches all images referenced in linked/imported CSS files (it iterates through each rule in each stylesheet attached and if the rule’s value contains an image URL, it loads the image, thus ensuring it’s available in the cache when used in the document.

The Preload CSS Images Function

jQuery.preloadCssImages = function(){

	var allImgs = [];//new array for all the image urls  
	var k = 0; //iterator for adding images
	var sheets = document.styleSheets;//array of stylesheets

	for(var i = 0; i0 && imgUrls != ''){//loop array

			var arr = jQuery.makeArray(imgUrls);//create array from regex obj        

			jQuery(arr).each(function(){
				allImgs[k] = new Image(); //new img obj
				allImgs[k].src = (this[0] == '/' || this.match('http://')) ? this : baseURL + this;     //set src either absolute or rel to css dir
				k++;
			});
		}
	}//loop
	return allImgs;
}

Usage

//preload only
$.preloadCssImages();

//load into array
var preloadedImgs = $.preloadCssImages();

This is the array of images!