By Christian GImage Projector – a lightbox Plugin
A unique, quiet, plug-and-play lightbox and image slider that let the visitor change viewing format, background and more.
Image Projector – a unique lightbox that provides a responsive full-window view and slider for images in posts or pages, including galleries and carousels. Developed for photos, useful for all types of images.
Features
- Plug and Play, no editing of code needed
- Context-dependent image collections automatically created
- Tolerant to markup variations
- Suitable for both block themes and classic themes
- Modify strings – translate frontend to targeted language region
- Visitor can switch view style and background
- Zoom and pan
- Autoplay
- Optional thumbstrip when relevant
- Optional support for flipping image and viewing image in grayscale
- Smooth navigation with mouse, wheel, keyboard or touch gestures
- Static controls that does not jump with the image size
- Uses on-demand image loading and preloading – fast startup
- Supports modern image formats WebP and AVIF when browser supports it
- Humble and quiet appearance
Demo
Collection based on first or featured image in posts. Used on an archive page, it will limit the collection to the images in queried posts (typically category and tag results or search results).
Check out examples of standard behaviour – it may also well be used in combination with 3rd party or WordPress native galleries.
For available admin options, please see settings.
Privacy Notice
This plugin does not track users. It does not store any data to the database other than plugin settings, neither does it send any data to any server.
Last used view style and background style is stored in a cookie on visitor’s device and applied if visitor returns.
Installation
New installation:
1. Upload the plugin to your WordPress plugin directory or install it by using the “Add Plugin” function of WordPress
2. Activate the plugin at the plugin administration page.
3. Modify the plugin settings as needed and save changes.
Update existing installation:
Press the Update button for the plugin or follow these steps:
- Download zip file from WordPress plugin directory.
- Deactivate the plugin.
- Unzip the downloaded file to the plugin folder.
- Activate the plugin. If any new options are added, check the settings pages and adjust settings as needed.
Screenshots
Full window with cut-off activated.
Image with frame.
Image with frame, showing thumbstrip.
Inside square on dark background. Right-click or click menu icon to show menu.
Typical settings page.
FAQ
-or possibly frequently asked…
Good question! Being a photo enthusiast having a WordPress site with one post per image, I realized after a while that there were limited possibilities to show the images in a smooth flow.
To avoid the cumbersome manual navigation between posts, I decided to (try to) write a plugin to collect the featured image (if it has a featured image) or first image from each post, show them in an image slider and then navigate to the post from the image. The content of the slider is then defined based on the context of the page, for intance an archive page that contain the result of a tag query.
Messing around with various gallery plugins – that always require som extra effort to set up – or modifying page template code was not an option.
Eventually the plugin was extended to be applied for general use as well, and the collection of post images and handling of navigation between posts has just become an optional feature that can be turned on/off from the plugin settings page.
Yes, for those users who are blessed with a keyboard:
right arrow/left arrow – next/previous
C – toggle caption if supported
A or P – toggle autoplay
B – switch background class
L – last image
T – swith between slide in/out or cross-fade transition
V or S – switch view style
X – exit
Z – zoom mode on/off
swipe left/right go to next/previous image
spipe up/down exit viewer
pinch – zoom
doubleclick/doubletap – enter/exit zoom mode
left mouse button down while swiping right/left with mouse – next/previous
ctrl key and left mouse button down while swiping up/down – enter zoom mode and do zooming
mousewheel – zoom when in zoom mode
click caption – turn off display of caption if captions are supported. Turn it on again from menu.
Probably due to that the the gallery or carousel wrapper is not detected. Please specify the parent element to all the gallery or carousel elements. If in doubt, do not hesitate to file a support ticket.
Yes. This can be specified in the plugin settings page.
Yes. Please have a look into the plugin settings page and the stylesheet located in the plugin directory. If you need advice on how to set up the styles, please leave a support message.
Yes, I would say so.
Most likely not, but it seem to work as expected in ‘all modern browsers’. There may be several ways of marking up a page so there could be situations when some tuning is necessary. Please leave a message in the support section if it does not work as expected.
Select None for Lightbox effects in the Other options page of NextGEN gallery plugin.
Changelog
5.9
- Added option in Features to control caption content.
- Improved image selection in picture tags.
- Minor updates.
5.8
- Enhanced string translation in Translations to control both menu string and tooltip string.
- Adjustments to the button visibility settings in Control page.
- Tested for WordPress 6.5.
5.7
- Added settings section Translations for translating or otherwise modifying strings that appear in the front-end menu and tooltips.
5.6.2
- Fixed image size issue on Firefox causing width and height not to correspond to actual image.
5.6.1
- Fixed icon display issue revealed on Firefox browser.
5.6
- Glitch introduced in 5.5 related to swipe velocity fixed.
5.5
- Added option in Features to control if Download command shall be available.
Availability can be limited to logged-in users. In case it is activated, Download command will be added to the menu. It will only be available for images located at the same domain as the page being viewed. - Added option in Controls to hide ‘X’ and zoom button on touch devices to simplify interface. Close and zoom can be controlled by commonly known touch gestures like swipe up/down or tap background to close, pinch in or double-tap to activate zooming.
- Minor general improvements.
- Tested for WordPress 6.4.
5.4
- Zoom – click on displayed zoom factor to show image in 1:1.
- Image counter – added more options to control display of the counter.
- Fixed error setting zoom center when pinching in view style 1.
5.3
- Late css loading revealed issues on certain themes. Moved css loading back to header.
- Added option in Features to show image counter. Default off.
- Now showing current image scale together with current zoom factor when zoom is active.
5.2
- Improvements to the full image and thumb image collection process.
5.1
- Removed use of file_get_contents that was used to load icon definition into page. Some servers may not be set up to allow this, resulting in no icons shown. Icon href now links to icon in svg sprite file included in the plugin.
- Fixed glitch that could cause a low resolution version of the image to be selected for viewing.