Image galleries and slideshows provide a good user experience and make viewing images more pleasant and intuitive on your website. With the advent of powerful JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, Mootools etc., the quality of JavaScript based image galleries and slideshows have improved dramatically.
As these frameworks are getting popular day by day, more and more web developers are coming out with new and creative ideas every day. Here are 21 brilliant jQuery plugins which you can easily use to create an image gallery/slideshow for your website.
1. Spacegallery
Spacegallery displays your images with a nice 3D effect and it is also pretty easy to use and customize.
2. prettyPhoto
prettyPhoto might look like jQuery Lightbox clone but it supports videos, flash, YouTube videos, iFrames besides images. It also comes with useful API and 4 beautiful themes. It is a great plugin to create an image as well as multimedia gallery.
3. Zoomimage
Stylish way to present your images in a nice popup with a drop shadow and border.
4. Pirobox
Another lightbox based image gallery plugin that resizes images based on browser size and next/prev links can be placed inside or outside of the image.
5. Galleria
Galleria generates an image gallery from an unordered list and once the images are loaded, thumbnail navigation is generated. It is easy to customize using just CSS and degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled.
6. jQuery PanelGallery
jQuery PanelGallery generates a slideshow of images with a unique transition. Image transition occurs in a sequential manner displaying the new image panel by panel, thus the name PanelGallery. It is lightweight and allows you to change the direction of panel transition.
7. jQuery Gallery Plugin
This plugin will transform a list of images into a flash like image gallery. Thumbnail navigation only shows up when you hover over the image and behaves like infinite carousel.
8. Step Carousel Viewer
This plugin displays images or any HTML content by side scrolling them left or right with a smooth sliding animation during transition. And with its two public methods and two custom event handlers, you can customize it to your requirement easily.
9. jQuery Virtual Tour
With this plugin, you can convert panoramic views into virtual tours, it degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled.
10. Ultimate Fade In Slide Show
This is a robust, cross browser fade in slideshow script that incorporates some of your most requested features all rolled into one.
11. ThickBox Gallery
jQuery Thickbox plugin can be used for creating a nice image viewer that shows images in a lightbox and supports keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the images.
12. GalleryView
GalleryView lets you create a flexible and attractive content that is very easy to implement and customize. Also, their way of explaining the anatomy of GalleryView plugin is very intuitive.
13. Flickr Gallery
Flickr Gallery generates a slideshow whose size varies with the size of image. As the name suggests, it can directly pull images from a flickr account(needs Flickr API key) or you can use just a simple unordered list. Thumbnail navigation is intuitive with a nice scrolling bar.
14.Easy Slider
Easy slider enables images to slide either horizontally or vertically and it can be styled easily using CSS. The latest version of this plugin supports continuous scroll instead of jumping over to first slide from last slide.
15. SuperSized
Using Supersized, you can display large sized photos easily as it will scale the images automatically depending on browser size and supports preloading of images for better experience.
