I’ve just discovered a quite nice little plugin for WordPress called ‘Lightbox’ (no relation to Lightroom by the way), via someone who’s already using it. Take a look at Kristian’s Photoblog in the links on the right.
It basically brings up nice full-size shots from thumbnails, but using javascript and pretty effects. With me being a sucker for non-pointless eyecandy, I’ve decided to it a try on here… Clicky clicky on the image to take a look
I was really rather impressed with the way it displays. It removes the need for popups, and also for complete new pages for full display of single images. I’m going to play with this over the next few weeks, as it gives me a great way to post single or small groups of images without the clunkyness of before. It also fades out the rest of the page, meaning you concentrate more on the image. This is similar to the ‘Lights Out’ feature of Lightroom, which is something I use all the time.
The lightbox plugin can be found at:-
http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/
UPDATE: Just discovered that if you enter [groupname] (with ‘groupname’ being a test string of your choice- e.g. [group1]) in the rel=”lightbox” section of the <a> tag, then it groups that image with any others in the post and allows you to go ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ through the images in that group, without having to close each one and open the next.
To generate the below, I used the following code :-
rel="lightbox[group1]"
in each of the <a> tags, rather than just rel="lightbox".
If you click on the first image in this example, then hover over the full size view, then ‘Next’ appears, which skips you to the next image…
Finally, adding title="put your title here" to the tag gives you the nice little titles on each pic, as in the example.
I’d also recommend ‘ImageManager’ which is a great replacement for the image uploader in WordPress. If you use the insert as ‘Thumbnail with Link to Image’ to paste in the image, automatically links it to Lightbox. I’m not sure if you’d have to install Imagemanger before lightbox, but anyway, here’s the link…
http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/
Enjoy!