Beamer: Background Color for Footline

Question

I define a custom footline template like that:

\setbeamertemplate{footline}{
    \hspace*{.5cm}
    \includegraphics[scale=0.07]{images/image1.png}
    \hspace{0.3cm}
    \scriptsize{Seite \insertframenumber}
    \hfill
    \includegraphics[scale=0.25]{images/image2.png}
    \hspace*{.5cm}
    \vspace{9pt}
}

How can I also define a background color for the whole footline? I want the footline to be light grey...

Answer 1

You can use a beamercolorbox:

\PassOptionsToPackage{demo}{graphicx}
\documentclass{beamer}

\setbeamercolor{footlinecolor}{fg=black,bg=lightgray}

\setbeamertemplate{footline}{%
  \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=1em,wd=\paperwidth,leftskip=0.5cm,rightskip=0.5cm]{footlinecolor}
    \includegraphics[scale=0.07,height=10pt]{images/image1.png}
    \hspace{0.3cm}%
    \scriptsize{Seite \insertframenumber}
    \hfill
    \includegraphics[scale=0.25,height=10pt]{images/image2.png}
  \end{beamercolorbox}%
}
\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
test
\end{frame}

\end{document}

The first line (\PassOptionsToPackage) was used only to make the example compilable for everyone by replacing the actual images with black rectangles; do not use that line in your actual code. I also set the images height to a sensible value for the example.