How do I position one image on top of another in HTML?

Question

I'm a beginner at rails programming, attempting to show many images on a page. Some images are to lay on top of others. To make it simple, say I want a blue square, with a red square in the upper right corner of the blue square (but not tight in the corner). I am trying to avoid compositing (with ImageMagick and similar) due to performance issues.

I just want to position overlapping images relative to one another.

As a more difficult example, imagine an odometer placed inside a larger image. For six digits, I would need to composite a million different images, or do it all on the fly, where all that is needed is to place the six images on top of the other one.

Answer 1

Ok, after some time, here's what I landed on:

.parent {
  position: relative;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
}
.image1 {
  position: relative;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  border: 1px red solid;
}
.image2 {
  position: absolute;
  top: 30px;
  left: 30px;
  border: 1px green solid;
}

<div class="parent">
  <img class="image1" src="https://placehold.it/50" />
  <img class="image2" src="https://placehold.it/100" />
</div>

As the simplest solution. That is:

Create a relative div that is placed in the flow of the page; place the base image first as relative so that the div knows how big it should be; place the overlays as absolutes relative to the upper left of the first image. The trick is to get the relatives and absolutes correct.