Carousel

A slideshow component for cycling through elements—images or slides of text—like a carousel.

How it works

The carousel is a slideshow for cycling through a series of content, built with CSS 3D transforms and a bit of JavaScript. It works with a series of images, text, or custom markup. It also includes support for previous/next controls and indicators.

In browsers where the Page Visibility API is supported, the carousel will avoid sliding when the webpage is not visible to the user (such as when the browser tab is inactive, the browser window is minimized, etc.).

Please be aware that nested carousels are not supported, and carousels are generally not compliant with accessibility standards.

Lastly, if you’re building our JS from source, it requires util.js.

Example

Carousels don’t automatically normalize slide dimensions. As such, you may need to use additional utilities or custom styles to appropriately size content. While carousels support previous/next controls and indicators, they’re not explicitly required. Add and customize as you see fit.

Be sure to set a unique id on the .carousel for optional controls, especially if you’re using multiple carousels on a single page.

Slides only

Here’s a carousel with slides only. Note the presence of the .d-block and .img-fluid on carousel images to prevent browser default image alignment.

<div id="carouselExampleSlidesOnly" class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel">
  <div class="carousel-inner">
    <div class="carousel-item active">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="First slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Second slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Third slide">
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

With controls

Adding in the previous and next controls:

<div id="carouselExampleControls" class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel">
  <div class="carousel-inner">
    <div class="carousel-item active">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="First slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Second slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Third slide">
    </div>
  </div>
  <a class="carousel-control-prev" href="#carouselExampleControls" role="button" data-slide="prev">
    <span class="carousel-control-prev-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span>
    <span class="sr-only">Previous</span>
  </a>
  <a class="carousel-control-next" href="#carouselExampleControls" role="button" data-slide="next">
    <span class="carousel-control-next-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span>
    <span class="sr-only">Next</span>
  </a>
</div>

With indicators

You can also add the indicators to the carousel, alongside the controls, too.

<div id="carouselExampleIndicators" class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel">
  <ol class="carousel-indicators">
    <li data-target="#carouselExampleIndicators" data-slide-to="0" class="active"></li>
    <li data-target="#carouselExampleIndicators" data-slide-to="1"></li>
    <li data-target="#carouselExampleIndicators" data-slide-to="2"></li>
  </ol>
  <div class="carousel-inner">
    <div class="carousel-item active">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="First slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Second slide">
    </div>
    <div class="carousel-item">
      <img class="d-block w-100" src="..." alt="Third slide">
    </div>
  </div>
  <a class="carousel-control-prev" href="#carouselExampleIndicators" role="button" data-slide="prev">
    <span class="carousel-control-prev-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span>
    <span class="sr-only">Previous</span>
  </a>
  <a class="carousel-control-next" href="#carouselExampleIndicators" role="button" data-slide="next">
    <span class="carousel-control-next-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span>
    <span class="sr-only">Next</span>
  </a>
</div>

Initial active element required

The .active class needs to be added to one of the slides. Otherwise, the carousel will not be visible.

With captions

Add captions to your slides easily with the .carousel-caption element within any .carousel-item. They can be easily hidden on smaller viewports, as shown below, with optional display utilities. We hide them initially with .d-none and bring them back on medium-sized devices with .d-md-block.

<div class="carousel-item">
  <img src="..." alt="...">
  <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block">
    <h3>...</h3>
    <p>...</p>
  </div>
</div>

Usage

Via data attributes

Use data attributes to easily control the position of the carousel. data-slide accepts the keywords prev or next, which alters the slide position relative to its current position. Alternatively, use data-slide-to to pass a raw slide index to the carousel data-slide-to="2", which shifts the slide position to a particular index beginning with 0.

The data-ride="carousel" attribute is used to mark a carousel as animating starting at page load. It cannot be used in combination with (redundant and unnecessary) explicit JavaScript initialization of the same carousel.

Via JavaScript

Call carousel manually with:

$('.carousel').carousel()

Options

Options can be passed via data attributes or JavaScript. For data attributes, append the option name to data-, as in data-interval="".

Name Type Default Description
interval number 5000 The amount of time to delay between automatically cycling an item. If false, carousel will not automatically cycle.
keyboard boolean true Whether the carousel should react to keyboard events.
pause string | boolean "hover"

If set to "hover", pauses the cycling of the carousel on mouseenter and resumes the cycling of the carousel on mouseleave. If set to false, hovering over the carousel won't pause it.

On touch-enabled devices, when set to "hover", cycling will pause on touchend (once the user finished interacting with the carousel) for two intervals, before automatically resuming. Note that this is in addition to the above mouse behavior.

ride string false Autoplays the carousel after the user manually cycles the first item. If "carousel", autoplays the carousel on load.
wrap boolean true Whether the carousel should cycle continuously or have hard stops.

Methods

Asynchronous methods and transitions

All API methods are asynchronous and start a transition. They returns to the caller as soon as the transition is started but before it ends. In addition, a method call on a transitioning component will be ignored.

See our JavaScript documentation for more information.

.carousel(options)

Initializes the carousel with an optional options object and starts cycling through items.

$('.carousel').carousel({
  interval: 2000
})

.carousel('cycle')

Cycles through the carousel items from left to right.

.carousel('pause')

Stops the carousel from cycling through items.

.carousel(number)

Cycles the carousel to a particular frame (0 based, similar to an array). Returns to the caller before the target item has been shown (i.e. before the slid.bs.carousel event occurs).

.carousel('prev')

Cycles to the previous item. Returns to the caller before the previous item has been shown (i.e. before the slid.bs.carousel event occurs).

.carousel('next')

Cycles to the next item. Returns to the caller before the next item has been shown (i.e. before the slid.bs.carousel event occurs).

Events

Bootstrap’s carousel class exposes two events for hooking into carousel functionality. Both events have the following additional properties:

  • direction: The direction in which the carousel is sliding (either "left" or "right").
  • relatedTarget: The DOM element that is being slid into place as the active item.
  • from: The index of the current item
  • to: The index of the next item

All carousel events are fired at the carousel itself (i.e. at the <div class="carousel">).

Event Type Description
slide.bs.carousel This event fires immediately when the slide instance method is invoked.
slid.bs.carousel This event is fired when the carousel has completed its slide transition.
$('#myCarousel').on('slide.bs.carousel', function () {
  // do something…
})