// the find
jakearchibald/sprite-cow
Sprite Cow helps you get the background-position, width and height of sprites within a spritesheet as a nice bit of copyable css.
Sprite Cow is a browser-based tool that lets you click a region on a spritesheet and get the CSS background-position, width, and height back as copyable code. It was built for developers who hand-craft their spritesheets rather than using automated generators. Useful if you're still maintaining legacy CSS sprite workflows.
The click-to-detect approach using canvas pixel scanning is genuinely clever — it flood-fills from your click point to find sprite boundaries automatically rather than requiring manual coordinate entry. Offline support via AppCache (dated, but it worked) shows the author thought about real workflow use. Jake Archibald is a credible author with deep browser knowledge, so the canvas pixel manipulation is likely correct across edge cases. The percent-based positioning option and 50% retina scaling are practical additions that show it was actually used in production.
CSS sprites are largely obsolete — HTTP/2 and SVG sprites have replaced the technique for most use cases, so the addressable audience has shrunk dramatically since 2011. Last meaningful activity was over a decade ago; the AppCache manifest it uses was deprecated and removed from browsers. The codebase is pre-module jQuery spaghetti with no build pipeline worth speaking of, so contributing or forking it is more work than just building something new. No tests, no CI, changelog stops at 2012.