I’ve always been impressed by those sites out there that have image overlays when you click on the thumbnails…and I’ve always wondered how it was done. I just assumed it was some kind of crazy Flash plugin or something. Nope.

To know what the Lightbox plugin is, I suppose you need to know what Lightbox is first. Lightbox uses Javascript to overlay images on your current site when you click on ‘em. Basically, you click on a picture and the site fades to the background and brings the focus to the picture. No need to load a new page, it’s all done via Javascript and CSS. Here’s an example using a pic I took in Vegas of New York New York:

LJ’ers - gotta make the jump over to see it. I’m sure you can do this via LJ somehow too, but I haven’t really looked into it.

You can also use it for image sets as well. Check out the author’s site. Pretty nifty.

Lightbox Image Overlay Script Homepage

For the users of WordPress, here’s a link to the plugin. No crazy trick to make it work. There are some minor changes you’ll have to make to some paths if you don’t have WordPress loaded in your root in both the .js and .php files, but you’ll figure it out. I’ll be happy to answer some questions if you need some help setting it up.

Link to WordPress plugin

So far, I’m seeing an issue when using this along with ‘Viper’s Video plugin’ which lets you view a variety of multimedia from sites like YouTube and MySpace via Wordpress. If you see the SNL skit below through your browser, that means I got it working! Otherwise, I hope to find a fix soon.