Lightbox is a fast growing way to present in a nice way an images or something else like inline html, video or an external site without opening a new window. In the old days most images(or other content) where presented in a new tab/window, which isn’t a pretty way to do this if you ask me.

Today we listed Top 15 jQuery Lightbox Plugins For Portfolio. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

ppGallery – Elegant Lightbox Gallery Jquery Plugin

Showcase your photo gallery in style with ppGallery by PP PLUGINS (www.ppplugins.com), an advanced lightbox photo gallery plugin built with the jQuery Framework. It is lightweight, unobtrusive and installs with ease.

jQuery lightBox plugin

jQuery lightBox plugin is simple, elegant, unobtrusive, no need extra markup and is used to overlay images on the current page through the power and flexibility of jQuery´s selector.

prettyPhoto

prettyPhoto is a jQuery lightbox clone. Not only does it support images, it also support for videos, flash, YouTube, iframes and ajax. It’s a full blown media lightbox.

ColorBox

A light-weight, customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery 1.3 through 1.6.

PIROBOX

Pirobox is a jQuery plugin that you can use to create Lighbox widget with support for multiple image sets and slideshows. It offers keyboard navigation, PNG Fix for IE6 and will automatically check for broken links to image files and display appropriate message. Pirobox is cross browser plugin that works on FireFox 2+, Opera9.5+, Chrome, Safari (Mac/Windows),IE 6+.

NyroModal

A fully customizable modal window plugin, providing a quick way to show data without reloading the entire page. It’s easy to use and easy to design.

jQuery.popeye

jQuery.popeye is an advanced image gallery script built on the JavaScript library jQuery. Use it to save space when displaying a collection of images and offer your users a nice and elegant way to show a big version of your images without leaving the page flow.

TopUp

TopUp is an easy to use Javascript library for unobtrusively displaying images and webpages in a Web 2.0 approach of popups. The library is jQuery and jQuery UI driven in order to maintain cross-browser compatibility and compactness. TopUp offers the following advantages:

YoxView

YoxView is a free Lightbox-type media and image viewer jQuery plugin. It’s easy to use and feature-rich.

jQuery SuperBox!

jQuery Superbox! is a script which allows you display windows with the lightbox effect.

ThickBox

ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.

Slimbox 2

Slimbox 2 is a 4 KB visual clone of the popular Lightbox 2 script by Lokesh Dhakar, written using the jQuery javascript library. It was designed to be very small, efficient, standards-friendly, fully customizable, more convenient and 100% compatible with the original Lightbox 2.

jQuery Lightbox Plugin (balupton edition)

jQuery Lightbox Plugin (balupton edition) is a light weighted (Only 21KB in size ) unique Lightboxes which add Titles and descriptions for images. Automatically additional files are included . So you only have to include one js file, and it does the rest. Easily configurable via many options, and extensible via custom events. So no file modifications are required. Lightbox automatic scroll and resize functionality .

ChillBox

Designed by Christopher Hill, and inspired by Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox2, ChillBox is a jQuery Plugin is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on top of the current page. It can be used for link anchor attributes. ChillBox has been tested with IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari and can also be used in conjunction with the Prototype Framework.

Shadowbox jQuery Lightbox Plugin

Shadowbox is a web-based media viewer application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can showcase a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.