> An image sprite is a collection of images put into a single image.
> A web page with many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests.
> Using image sprites will reduce the number of server requests and save bandwidth
Used in sprite-based games (obviously) - a `Sprite Sheet` is actually **one** image that contains _all_[^1] the sprite **frames**. This sheet gets loaded to memory once, then each rendered frame shows a different section of the sheet, rather than loading up a bunch of individual _files_ and replacing the displayed file each time.
You can also use sprites in [[HTML CSS and JavaScript|CSS]] to load one image asset and show different parts of it for different UI elements (or on hover, for example).
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# More
## Source
- https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp
## Related
[^1]: technically you could have multiple sheets & split them out, but whatever.