A lightbox is one of the best ways to present images and videos in WordPress, and there are understandably quite a number of plugins to choose from.
Lets take a look at some of the best lightbox plugins out there.
Foobox
FooBox is a fully responsive media lightbox plugin for WordPress, with the goal to make your images, video, and HTML content look beautiful on all devices. It transforms your dull image galleries and media elements into an awesome responsive experience, with built-in social sharing and sexy slideshow functionality to boot.
FooBox even changes at every screen resolution to best fit your mobile device, and it works immediately with your existing WordPress Galleries. NextGen Gallery, Justified Image Grid and other plugins are not required (but are fully supported).
You can check out their demos here.
Pricing:
Personal – $27 | Multi – $67 | Business – $97
JackBox
JackBox for WordPress is built on a simple idea. The idea that you can connect your page and post content to a lightbox.This means no shortcodes and no gallery managers to figure out. Instead, JackBox is baked into your content editor and works just like the traditional “hyperlink” button. Except instead of just adding a simple link, you create a lightbox item!
It was originally built with 2 goals in mind. The first was to create a lightbox that worked on mobile devices, even smartphones. JackBox is “responsive”, which means it’s 100% compatible with responsive websites. The second was to create a lightbox where every image, video and song can be individually shared. This means when someone “likes” one of your photos, when a friend clicks on the shared link, they’ll instantly be shown the exact photo that was originally shared.
Pricing:
Regular License – $18 | Extended License – $90
Get JackBox
Nivo Lightbox
There are a tonne of jQuery & WordPress lightbox plugins in the world but none of them are as simple to setup and use as the Nivo Lightbox while still offering the flexibility and accessibility available with the Nivo Lightbox. It is responsive, retina-ready and simple to setup for mobile too.
The Nivo Lightbox automatically detects the type of content you are trying to show and loads it correctly. No extra setup required. So no matter if you are trying to show images, image galleries, AJAX, Flash, Youtube or Vimeo videos, another website or just inline HTML, Nivo Lightbox has you covered.
Pricing:
Single Site – $29 | Extended – $49 | Developer – $99
Get Nivo Lightbox
iLightBox
iLightBox allows you to easily create the most beautiful responsive overlay windows using the jQuery JavaScript library. By combining support for a wide range of media with gorgeous skins and a user-friendly API, iLightBox aims to push the Lightbox concept as far as possible.
Pricing:
Regular License – $20 | Extended License – $100
Get iLightBox
Responsive Lightbox by dFactory
Responsive Lightbox allows users to view larger versions of images and galleries in a lightbox (overlay) effect optimized for mobile devices.
For more information, check out the plugin page at dFactory or check out the Live demo.
Download Responsive Lightbox by dFactory
WP Video Lightbox
The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display.
This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a lightbox overlay. The embedded videos can be viewed on iPhone and iPad too.
Easy FancyBox
The Easy FancyBox plugin for WordPress gives you a flexible and aesthetic lightbox solution for just about all media links on your website. Easy FancyBox uses the packed FancyBox jQuery extension and is WP 3+ Multi-Site compatible.
After activation, all links to JPG, GIF and PNG images are automatically opened in the FancyBox Mac-style lightbox that floats over the web page. Most options available can be managed with this plugin along with some extra features.
WordPress Colorbox Lightbox
WP Colorbox plugin is a simple lightbox tool for WordPress. It allows users to pop up content in lightbox using the popular jQuery ColorBox library. They can also view the larger version of a particular media file without leaving the page.
Download WordPress Colorbox Lightbox
WP Lightbox 2
WP Lightbox 2 adds the responsive lightbox (overlay) effect to the current page images and creates photo albums/galleries on your WordPress blog. Just install and sit back. This plugin enables the image overlay lighbox effect for all the post images on your WordPress site – no configuration required.
Lightbox CSS3
CSS3 Lightbox is a beautiful high-performance lightbox without any jQuery or Javascript code. It’s incredibly fast since it uses the latest CSS3 lightbox technology and makes use of only browser native CSS3 functions. This speed is especially visible on mobile devices since it doesn’t depend on Javascript libraries like other lightbox plugins.
HUGE-IT Lightbox
Huge-IT Lightbox is the perfect tool for viewing photos and videos. It is created especially for simplificity in usage, permits you to view larger version of images and videos and provides an interesting design. The video link can be from two sources – Vimeo and YouTube.
Simple Lightbox
Simple Lightbox is a very simple and customizable lightbox that is easy to add to your WordPress website.
With well over half a million downloads from the WordPress.org repository it’s certainly one of the most popular lightbox plugins out there, and there is now even a new Beta version for you to check out.
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6 Responses
Hi all,
Thank you for a good listing of lightbox plugins. We have developed “ARI Fancy Lightbox” WordPress lightbox based on the latest version of popular Fancybox jQuery plugin and suppose it can be used to extend plugin’s list from the article.
“ARI Fancy Lightbox” can display any content (images, videos from different services, web pages and inline content), supports deeplinking and social sharing. Possible to create a splash popup. Can choose between free and PRO versions:
Any feedbacks are welcome.
Hi there!
I’ve developed a lightbox plugin for WordPress, it’s new but quite appreciated (currently 18 ratings all 5 stars).
It’s focused on social sharing it has icons to share images on main social networks and you can also enable facebook comments on each image.
And, well it’s completely free (no freeware, no demo, just 100% free 🙂 )
I’d really like feedbacks!
Diego
Hi, I was looking for a plugin that would help me to add a link to a post so that it opens in a lightbox/popup (without headers, footer or sidebars). Can you suggest me any such plugins?
Cool collection of WP plugin for image effects! It inspires me more. And also, this showcase will be more fantastic if you could include some free plugins.Thanks!
I’m looking for a lightbox / portfolio / gallery plugin that will allow users to pick images from the photo store website and add / delete them from their own personal lightbox. You can call it an image / product wish list. Oh – and it’s for WordPress. Any ideas?
Hi Dave. Did you find solution to this, as I’m looking for the same thing?