Avoid Ugly Image presentation

One of the easiest ways to make your website more actractive is using a ‘lightbox’ for displaying images. Default action for imanges is to desplay them just plain in the browser. This is not only a ugly presentation but it is also user unfriendly.

On my main website I’ve actually been using this bad presentation for far to long, reason for this is that I didn’t not know better, or actually didn’t know how easy the solution could be.

There are several (good) plugins available which will do the trick. I tried 3 of them:

3 Lightbox Plugins to display WordPress images

1. Huge IT lightbox

This is a nice solution which has a free and a premium version. I tried the free version which for basic use is fine. Reason that I didn’t use this plugin on my websit:

• The [x] button did not display correct. (might be related the theme I use: Woopress)
• It displays a too much images on my product pages. Somehow the plugin found images on my product page that were not related to the selected product.. this ofcourse is very strange. You are looking at a headphone and a phonecase is display? That was a no go for me. But then again, might be theme related issue.

2. WP Lightbox 2

This is a lightweight lightbox plugin which works fine. Only issue for me: Text is displayd in English and the site I needed this for was dutch. I did not want to make the translation myself so I decided not to use this plugin.

3. Wp Lightbox Bank Standard Edition

This is a really nice, clean easy to use Lightbox solution. It does not use text so translation is not an issue. Also it only displays only images related to the page your view. It looks nice and professional but it is not very customizable. For now this is the plugin I end up using.

In conclusion

If you want to get rid of the plain image view use one of the plugins above. I prefer WP Lightbox Bank because it has no downsites for me.

If you want a highly customizable solutions, look at Huge IT Lightbox. If the free version is doing oke (no theme compatibility issues) then you can consider buying the premium version to customize to you needs.

WP Lightbox 2 is also fine if you use it on an english website (I use this plugin in this site)