Top 10 jQuery Image Plugins

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This week’s Top 10 is all around presenting images to users. Gone are the days where we place images thumbnails in a page that open a new badly sized browser window. These days you can animate lovely modal windows, or show great animated slideshows with carousels… Good times, so let’s check them out!

1) Slimbox

Slimbox 2 is a really great, lightweight modal window view for images. Implementation is pretty easy, and the plugin weighs in at a measly 4KB. A winner in many respects, and a great demo page Functionality is pretty good, centering and focussing the user on the image within the center of the screen. It also employs keyboard shortcuts to close the image preview.

2) Image Layering

Background Layers is actually a really powerful plugin. In the world of transparent PNG files, you can build a great composite image from multiple files with ease. It certainly makes a developers life easier, aswell as giving you animation possibilities within images like the above.

3) Innerfade

Innerfade is pretty simple – it allows you to show a slideshow of images, with a lovely fade animation between each one. Always a winner – and it also works with other elements such as text, so not just images.

4) jqGalViewII

jqGalViewII – Seeing is believing with this one – it really is an awesome way to present multiple thumbnails in a great userfriendly interface. The developer has also implemented captions too which makes this uber awesome!

5) Slides

Slides is another “does what it says on the tin” type plugin which makes great image to image transitions possible very easily. If you’re looking for a quick win, this is it!

6) Fancy Zoom

Fancy Zoom is a neat little play on the modal window preview of images… When invoked it actually zooms from the thumbnail onto the image… nice trick and could be well used!

7) Pikachoose

Pikachoose is another nice gallery generator with alot of flexibility. It’ll take your unordered list of images, and bam! create a nice click through gallery for you with some sweet animations in between.

jQPuzzle

For the more fun-inclined websites, jQPuzzle gives you the ability to create funcky picture puzzles out of your images. Pretty easy implementation, and also goes that extra step to get your users interacting with your website. Fun!!

9) Captify

Captify is a a great user friendly way to display captions across any image. It’s got great slide-in animations and the implementation is pretty good too. Would definitely recommend to anyone wanting to display captions with their images.

10) Image Preload

We have the Filament Group to thank for this little ditsy. This one is actually a bit of a cheat, in the sense that its not presenting the images to the user, however it does play an important part. Preloading and caching images upon page load is an extremely important part of any site that uses modal windows, or functionality where an image is not necessarily already part of the DOM. This neat plugin allows you to pre-load any images that are part of your CSS with one nifty function all.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this jQuery article, and the others I am presenting. As always – leave me a comment, it’s good to hear from you – or catch me on twitter.