20 Useful Lightbox Plugins for WordPress

Enhance the look of your website with a Responsive Lightbox Plugin

Lightbox Plugins are probably the most popular ones in WordPress sites. Such plugins are used as an appealing and elegant way to display images, videos and sometimes inline content.

If you are doing web design, it will be a good idea to have a collection of good of lightbox plugins which you can use as a reference when such plugin is required.

In this collection, I have compliled a list of 20 useful Lightbox plugins that will be helpful when designers are creating beautiful WordPress websites.

The Alpine PhotoTile for Pinterest

This plugin allows you to display photos from a Pinterest user or board. Photos can be linked to a particular Pinterest page, specific URL or to a slideshow Lightbox. There is also a Shortcode Generator so you can create such and insert them into posts. A full description and demo can be seen at the Alpine Press.

Easy FancyBox

Easy FancyBox is a WordPress plugin that will give you a very authentic and flexible lightbox for all the media links on your WordPress website. This Easy FancyBox plugin uses the packed FancyBox jQuery extension and is compatible up to 4.0.1. After installing it, you can head to your Settings – Media admin page where you can adjust the options. After activation, all image files will be automatically opened in FancyBox Mac style lightbox.

FooBox – Image LightBox

FooBox is a plugin that works great with responsive layouts and allows you to have a great mobile experience. It scales the images to look beautiful on small devices rearranges the button controls so portrait and landscape orientation. It also works with most image gallery plugins but the best fit is the free FooGallery plugin.

HUGE-IT LightBox

Huge-IT LIghtbox is great tool for presenting photos and videos in a lightbox. It allows you to view larger versions of videos and images. The videos can be added from both Vimeo and YouTube. It is a very simple plugin, so after installation it will automatically work with all the image files.

HUGE-IT Video Gallery

Huge-IT Video Gallery is a plugin created specifically to show Vimeo and YouTube videos in a lovely way. You can choose from 5 great-looking views and pick the one the fits best with your website style. One of the features is the ability to show a video with a simple description aside.

IW Magnific Popup

IW Magnific Popup is a basic plugin which enables the well-known Magnific Popup image lightbox to work with single images in your posts and pages. It works with the built-in WordPress gallery and also with WooCommerce product images. The image galleries are easily navigated as the plugin adds arrows for better browsing. Adding an alt attribute to an image will activate the lightbox captions.

Lightbox Bank

Lightbox Bank is one of the newest responsive plugins for displaying images. It is mobile friendly, retina ready and it has a touch navigation enabled. The touch navigation is created with keeping in mind the adaptability of mobile phones and tablets. Videos can be added from Vimeo and YouTune and it also allows you to enable it on all WordPress images and attachments.

Lightbox CSS3

CSS3 LIghtbox is a high-performance lightbox plugin created with CSS3 only which means that it is totally independent from jQuery and JavaScript. It is a very fast as takes advantage of browser native CSS3 functions. CSS3 Lightbox is a great options if you want to have a fast and great experience on mobile devices without the heaviness of JavaScript libraries.

Lightbox Gallery

The Lightbox Gallery plugin is a straightforward solution for a viewing galleries with a lightbox features. It also extends the default gallery options and additional options are set in the options page. There is a tooltip view of the captions of the images. If you require a simple solution for WP galleries, this plugin will give you that as it is a gimmicks-free.

Lightbox Plus Colorbox

If you are familiar with the Colorbox plugin created by Jack Moore, you will be pleased to know that Lightbox Plus Colorbox uses it as a lightbox image overlay tool for WordPress. This plugin will allow your visitors to view a larger version of the images that are included in posts and pages. As some of the other plugins mentioned above, Lightbox Plus Colorbox works greats with the default WordPress gallery images and is able to add lightbox to simple slideshow, video, forms and external content in overlays.

Fancy Gallery

Fancy Gallery is a new gallery management tool which is a great solution for organizing image galleries in the WordPress backend. This gallery plugin adds a beautiful lightbox effect to all the image links on a website. The effect fully is responsive, touch-enabled, and perfectly optimized both desktop and mobile web browsers and it is triggered on every image on a website whether it is in a post, gallery, page or a widget.

PopupAlly

PopupAlly is a lighbox plugin that will allow you create an advanced popup singup form very quickly. This plugin is a great solution if you want to grow you mailing list and use it when visitors are about to exit your website. The exit-intent popups will help you capture lost visitors and increase conversion by over 300%. This plugin is suitable for people who are not familiar with any code and want an easy way to create advanced signup forms.

Responsive Lightbox Lite

This plugin offers an elegant solution to add lightbox functionality for inline html content, images and other media. There is an option to set the lightbox effect automatically to all images, galleries and videos. It is responsive, lightweight and can be easily customized through CSS.

Responsive Lightbox by dFactory

This plugin also allows users to see a larger version of images and galleries in an overlay effect but it is specifically optimized for mobile devices. After installing it, there is an option to select from 5 different lightbox scripts – SwipeBox, prettyPhoto, FancyBox, Nivo Lightbox, Image Lightbox. The lightbox effect is automatically added to galleries, image links and video links. It has multisite support and there is a .pot file included for the translations.

Responsive Photo Gallery

Responsive Photo Gallery plugin is based on the Bootstrap framework and you can add unlimited images on your blog site. It has a lovely fade animation to show the overlaid images and two gallery layouts with different fonts. In addition, an isotope effect is provided to adjust images to screen resolutions.

The shortcode feature allows you to publish images and galleries to any post or page. Multiple gallery shortcode feature also included for convenience.

WordPress Colorbox Lightbox

WordPress Colorbox Lightbox is another versatile tool for displaying content in a popup. It uses the popular jQuery Colorbox library and allows users to view videos (Vimeo and YouTube), images, pages, inline HTML and any custom content in a lightbox popup. It fully responsive and fits perfectly on smaller screens.

Nimble Portfolio

Nimble Portfolio is a jQuery Portfolio plugin suitable for showcasing portfolio, pictures, videos and media. I will sort the media files under filterable tabs. The plugin comes with a built-in PrettyPhoto lightbox but it can be customized by using other add-ons. Nimble portfolio is fully responsive so the media files are displayed perfectly on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. There is also a shortcode generator and it is widget enabled.

WP jQuery Lightbox

WP jQuery Lightbox is a drop-in replacement for Lightbox 2 but sheds the bulk of the Prototype Framework and Scriptaculous Effects Library. It is specifically optimized for mobile devices, providing localization support and optional autoboxing of image links and default WordPress galleries, including media library titles and captions.

WP Lightbox 2

WP Lightbox 2 is a great tool for adding responsive lightbox effect for images. You can also create a lightbox photo gallery on any post or page in a WordPress site. It is configurable and there are many useful settings to adjust the lightbox effects in different ways. Some of the features are: ability to set animation duration and use lightbox in comments, option to add additional text below the images and change the info position of an image. It also works on all modern browsers.

WP Video Lightbox

WP Video Lightbox is specifically developed for adding YouTube and Vimeo videos with an elegant lightbox overlay. You can also add images, iframes and flash content. What’s more the videos can be viewed on iPad and iPhones. Embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos can be done with a simple adjustable shortcode.

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