JavaScript Image Slideshow Galleries Like Lightbox
Recently I’ve been wanting to use something like Lightbox but without all the bloated code. Prototype (a JavaScript framework) and script.aculo.us (interface library for Prototype) can be quite big, or at least bigger than I like my scripts to be. Of course thats why I prefer jQuery, but I recently read about mootools which lets you pick and choose what you need and will compress it before you download it. However, I’m not sure if mootools is as easy to write scripts with as jQuery is, but I figured I’d just throw that alternative out there.
Anyway back to the list of scripts that will work like Lightbox
- Lightbox - the original (requires Prototype and script.aculo.us)
- Lightbox 2 - even prettier than the original (requires Prototype and script.aculo.us)
- Lightbox Plus - like Lightbox 2 but will resize the image to fit the window
- Lightbox++ - based on Lightbox 2 but supports Flash, was once known as SWFBox (requires Prototype and script.aculo.us)
- Slimbox - visual clone of Lightbox 2 but much smaller (requires mootools)
- Thickbox - not as pretty as Lightbox 2 but it supports images, IFRAME, Flash, PDFs and more. It will also resize the image to fit the window (requires jQuery)
- Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux - based on several other well known effects
- ModalBox - it will also create modal dialogs or even wizards
- LightWindow - supports images, IFRAME, Flash, PDFs (requires Prototype and script.aculo.us)
- sLightbox a SmoothGallery extension (requires mootools)
- GreyBox - yet another image gallery
- Litebox - uses moo.fx and prototype.lite
- FancyZoom - Nice Mac looking zoom effect
- iBox - It automatically scales the image to the size of the browser’s viewing pane if it’s too big (Thickbox does that also). The JavaScript is 19kb and it uses target attribute for a CSS popup if JavaScript is disabled.
There are probably about 20 other variations of Lightbox and Lightbox 2, other homegrown versions and even some commercial versions, but I think this list is the best of the best (plus many of them are up to date and in constant development). Slimbox, Thickbox and Litebox are the lightweights in the list.
Added Litebox
Added FancyZoom
Added iBox