This site previously made use of Lightbox Plus. One neat benefit of it was that it allowed for image resizing. The downsides, unfortunately, managed to overcome that for me. At first I figured I’d go back to plain, old Lightbox (which the site had used already for about one whole day)… Then I stumbled upon Slimbox. Same idea, except the file size involved is far lower and it runs quite a bit more smoothly… and so, on we go.

With Slimbox, when you click on a thumbnail, instead of the image opening in a new window, it is displayed within an overlay. This way you’re never taken away from the site or have to deal with intrusive new windows.

Note: If you are using Firefox or a similar browser, external Javascript will be loaded after everything else on the page. As such, Slimbox will not work properly until the page is fully loaded. Please keep this in mind.

Slimbox has several features that we felt would be of benefit here.

1. Next and Previous Buttons that appear when you hover over the image.
2. Images can be easily grouped so that you may scroll between images.
3. A loading icon while the next image is being brought up. Ours uses Tik-Tok from Demi-Kids incase you’re wondering.
4. Easy to close. You may either use the close out button on the top right or click outside of the image to return to the main site (especially useful for larger images).
5. Slimbox does not allow you to simply right click and save an image when it is opened. However, you may simply right click the thumbnail and choose “save link as…” (or whatever variant your browser uses) and save the full-sized image where ever you please. It’s not my intention to block people from saving images off of this site, so there’s a compromise.

The nice thing about Slimbox is that if you don’t have a browser capable of using it (namely, one with Javascript), it will simply open images as normal. So don’t worry, either way you’ll get to see what’s there.

This page was published on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:35 pm. You can follow any responses to this page through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.