The Best 20 Free jQuery Lightbox & Image Gallery Plugin

Chocolat.js is a free responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that helps you to display one or several images staying on the same page. The choice is left to the user to group a series of pictures as a link or let them appear as thumbnails.

Features:-

1. It comes with an API and multiples CSS classes, making it very handy for advanced users and easy to use for New Comers.
2. Work well with all major web browsers.
3. Only 23 kb and reaches 10 kb once minified.
4. Works on desktop, tablet & mobile. You can also define your breakpoints.
5. Open your image gallery in the entire window, fullscreen, and opened in a container (a block element on the page).
6. You can choose to crop the image or make it perfectly fit its parent (be it any block), but it’s still quite unclear.
7. Loop
8. You can navigate through the images using your keyboard and assign keys.

Download:- Chocolat.js

A one-stop-shop jQuery plugin for scrolling/swiping through all different kinds of content. On a desktop, tablet, or Smartphone, inside an HTML element, or as a lightbox popup. Users can create lightbox popup galleries just as easily as “inline” sliders.

Features:-

1. responsive CSS interface for sizing and positioning.
2. Create lightbox galleries just as easy as “inline” sliders.
3. Drag or swipe to slide to the next/previous slide(s).
4. Double-tap or pinch to zoom on images.
5. Slides were quickly organized into a gallery.
6. It works just as well on a desktop as it does on a tablet or smartphone.
7. Highly Customizable
8. viewport-scale dependent buttons and caption sizes
9. Currently supports showing images, videos, and HTML content.
10. Optimized preloading content; not too soon, not too late.
11. Retina Ready

Download:-  jQuery.TosRUs

Lighter is a jQuery plugin designed to provide gallery view for images like other lightbox plugins.

Download:- jQuery Lighter

Magnific Popup is a responsive lightbox & dialog script plugin focusing on performance and providing the best user experience for users with any device. It’s a Fast, light, mobile-friendly, and responsive lightbox and modal dialog plugin.

Download:- Magnific Popup

Video Lightning is a jQuery Lightbox plugin that converts any element into a lightbox or popover link for YouTube and Vimeo videos.

Features:-

1. Simple access to all embed API options for both providers.
2. Lots of options to customize and beautify your lightboxes
3. Intelligent popover auto-positioning gravitates to the page center.
4. Preview videos on hover, pin if you want them to stick around.
5. Lazy loading of videos prevents slow page load due to video embeds.
6. Rick Roll with ease

Download:- Video Lightning

BlurBox is a simple jQuery lightbox plugin that blurs the background. On small screens (<= 480px), that doesn’t make much sense, so the plugin instead switches to a sheet that slides up from the bottom & darkens some background.

Download:- BlurBox

FluidBox is a jQuery plugin that replicates and improves the lightbox module seen on Medium with fluid transitions. You are opening images seamlessly in a lightbox on your page without interruption. This project was originally initiated as a personal challenge to replicate Medium’s lightbox module, but it soon developed into a full-fledged jQuery plugin.

Download:- Fluidbox

VenoBox is a responsive jQuery modal window plugin specially designed for images, inline contents, iFrames, Google Maps, Vimeo, and YouTube videos.

Download:- VenoBox

Featherlight is a very lightweight jQuery lightbox plugin. Flexible yet straightforward image, Ajax, iframe supported minimal CSS name-spaced responsive plugin utterly customizable via config object call with custom content.

Features:-

1. Simple yet flexible
2. Image, Ajax, iFrame, and custom content support
3. Gallery extension
4. Minimal CSS
5. Name-spaced CSS and JavaScript
6. Responsive
7. Accessible
8. Customizable via javascript or attributes

Download:- Featherlight

Smoothbox is a lightweight yet straightforward jQuery lightbox script by Kevin Thornbloom.

Features:-

1. Lightweight [1.7Kb]
2. Easy to Preloads images
3. Built-in gallery for multiple items
4. CSS3 transitions for smoother effects
5. Responsive image sizes

Download:- Smoothbox

zoomingBox is a jQuery lightbox plugin that enables you to use the lightbox modal as a container for a larger zoomed image.

Download:- zoomingBox

Visual LightBox is a free wizard app that helps you quickly generate popup image galleries with a terrific lightbox overlay effect in a few clicks without writing a single line of code.

Just drag & drop your photos into the Visual LightBox window, press “Publish,” and your picture slideshow with beautiful lightbox effects will instantly open in the browser!

Features:-

1. Cross Browser
2. GUI wizard – no coding, just point-&-click
3. Responsive
4. Mobile Friendly
5. Search engine friendly and semantically valid
6. Unobtrusive
7. An extensive collection of fancy Lightbox themes
8. Easy export to Joomla module or WordPress lightbox plugin
9. Keyboard navigation
10. Floating and smooth cross-fade transition
11. Lightweight jQuery Lightbox code (12Kb only)
12. Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa support
13. Built-in FTP client – upload directly to your server
14. Visual insert-to-page
15. 31 language interface

Download:- Visual LightBox

Swipebox is a touchable jQuery lightbox plugin for desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Features:-

1. Swipe gestures for mobile
2. Keyboard Navigation for desktop
3. CSS transitions with jQuery fallback
4. Retina support for UI icons
5. Easy CSS customization
6. Video, Images, and Inline content

Download:- Swipebox

Lightbox_me is an easy-to-use lightbox plugin for jQuery. Feed it a DOM element wrapped in a jQuery object, and it will lightbox it for you.

Features:-

1. Control overlay resizes when the window change.
2. Handles overlay size in cases where the document is smaller than the window
3. Handles position: fixed in all browsers
4. Position: fixed automatically swaps to position: absolute when the window size is smaller than the modal, so the user can scroll to see the contents
5. Tiny footprint (just over 1000 bytes gzipped & compressed)
6. Small DOM overhead (adds 1 DOM element for the overlay)
7. Dynamic iFrame shim is created and destroyed for the IE 6 select box peek issue
8. Supports IE 7+, Firefox 2.5+, Safari, Chrome

Download:- Lightbox_me

fancyBox is a simple lightbox plugin that offers a nice and elegant way to add zooming functionality for images, HTML content, and multi-media on your web pages.

Download:- fancyBox

Fresco is a beautifully designed, responsive jQuery lightbox plugin. Developers can use the Fresco plugin to create stunning overlays that work great at any screen size in all browsers on every device.

Download:- Fresco

OverBox is a Responsive and Touch-Enabled jQuery plugin that helps you present your content in a modern and fresh way giving your customers a fantastic viewing experience.

Features:-

1. Responsive and Touch Enabled
2. Innovative organization of Screen Elements.
3. different UI visualization on each device type
4. “Highlighting” the content: the attention set on presenting your content.
5. Images, iFrame, HTML5 Video, Flash, and Ajax
6. 5 Open / Close effects and 5 Navigation effects.
7. Deeplinking
8. Multiple Instances per page.
9. Keyboard controllable UI.
10. Infinite Navigation.
11. Three simple steps to Install
12. 24 Options to customize

Download:- OverBox

ScalableLightbox is a jQuery plugin for building aesthetically minimalistic, responsive picture lightboxes. Index module for providing an overview with thumbnails and a lightbox module for responsively displaying high-res images.

Download:- Scalable Lightbox

The strip is an unobtrusive, responsive lightbox that only partially covers the website. It is less intrusive and leaves room to interact with the page on larger screens while giving smaller mobile devices the classic Lightbox experience.

Download:- Strip lightbox