radogado

Rado’s Native Lightbox instantly upgrades every WordPress gallery into a beautiful, full-screen lightbox carousel. Just activate and go — your existing galleries are transformed automatically, no shortcodes to learn, no settings pages to configure.
Built on <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Native Carousel</a>, it uses the browser’s own scroll-snapping instead of heavy animation libraries. The result is buttery-smooth swiping on phones, fluid keyboard navigation on desktops, and a total footprint of roughly 13 KB — smaller than a single thumbnail image.
Why this plugin?
<ul>
<li>Zero configuration — activate it and every gallery on your site becomes a lightbox carousel. Deactivate it and galleries revert to normal. Nothing is written to your database.</li>
<li>Truly lightweight — ~13 KB total (JS + CSS). No jQuery, no frameworks, no external requests. Your PageSpeed score stays intact.</li>
<li>Works with any theme — Twenty Twenty-Five, Astra, GeneratePress, or anything else. The plugin bundles everything it needs.</li>
<li>Accessible by default — full keyboard navigation, focus trapping in the lightbox, screen-reader labels on every control, and <code>prefers-reduced-motion</code> support.</li>
<li>Native scroll-snap — hardware-accelerated, 60 fps swiping powered by the browser itself, not JavaScript animation loops.</li>
<li>Dark mode aware — the lightbox overlay adapts to the visitor’s system color scheme automatically.</li>
</ul>
Features at a glance:
<ul>
<li>Full-screen lightbox with swipe, keyboard and mouse-wheel navigation</li>
<li>Compact thumbnail index strip with scrollable overflow</li>
<li>“Thumbnails only” toggle in both the Block Editor sidebar and Classic Editor settings</li>
<li>Endless (infinite loop) navigation</li>
<li>Lazy-loaded images with low-resolution placeholder blur while loading</li>
<li>Captions and alt text fully preserved</li>
<li>Featured-image click opens the matching gallery slide on single posts</li>
<li>Editor performance guard — caps image sizes in the block editor to prevent crashes with large galleries</li>
</ul>
How it works:
The plugin intercepts gallery rendering at display time and outputs <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Native Carousel</a> HTML markup. Your post content is never modified — the transformation is purely visual and fully reversible.
<h3>Third-party source code</h3>
This plugin bundles minified assets from Native Carousel, an open-source carousel component (GPL-2.0-or-later).
<ul>
<li>Homepage & documentation: <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://nativecarousel.com/</a></li>
<li>Source code repository: <a href="https://github.com/radogado/n-carousel" rel="nofollow ugc">https://github.com/radogado/n-carousel</a></li>
</ul>
The following files in <code>assets/</code> are the minified production builds:
<ul>
<li><code>n-carousel.min.js</code> — carousel runtime</li>
<li><code>n-carousel-preload.min.js</code> — image preloader</li>
<li><code>n-carousel.min.css</code> — carousel styles</li>
</ul>
The unminified, human-readable source is available in the GitHub repository linked above. No build tools are needed to work with this plugin’s own code — <code>gallery-lightbox.css</code> and the admin JavaScript files are shipped unminified and readable.
This plugin is also maintained as part of the niui theme project: 
<a href="https://gitlab.com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox" rel="nofollow ugc">https://gitlab.com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox</a>

Rado's Native Lightbox

Transforms WordPress galleries into lightweight lightbox carousels. Works with any theme — only ~13 KB.

Archetyped

Simple Lightbox is a very simple and customizable lightbox that is easy to add to your WordPress website.
<h4>Features</h4>
Options for customizing the lightbox behavior are located in the Appearance > Lightbox admin menu (or just click the Settings link below the plugin’s name when viewing the list of installed plugins)
<ul>
<li>Automatically activate links (no manual coding required)</li>
<li>Automatically resize lightbox to fit in window</li>
<li>Customize lightbox with themes</li>
<li>Mobile-optimized responsive themes included</li>
<li>Customizable lightbox animations</li>
<li>Infinitely customizable with add-ons</li>
<li>Supports WordPress image attachment links</li>
<li>Supports links in widgets</li>
<li>Keyboard Navigation</li>
<li>Display media metadata (caption, description, etc.) in lightbox</li>
<li>Enable Lightbox depending on Page Type (Home, Pages, Archive, etc.)</li>
<li>Group image links (play as a slideshow)</li>
<li>Group image links by Post (separate slideshow for each post on page)</li>
</ul>
<h4>Usage</h4>
<ol>
<li>Insert links to images/image attachments into your posts/pages</li>
</ol>
That’s it! The image will be displayed in a lightbox automatically.
<ul>
<li>For more usage tips, go to <a href="http://archetyped.com/tools/simple-lightbox/" rel="nofollow ugc">Simple Lightbox’s official page</a></li>
<li>See <a href="https://github.com/archetyped/simple-lightbox/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">Simple Lightbox’s documentation</a> for in-depth information on using and customizing SLB.</li>
</ul>

Simple Lightbox


I installed it, linked a picture and it worked. I could not find an embed of Google Fonts (using Firefox Inspector) so the GDPR-Complaint seems to be outdated.


Installed. Used. Simple!

The highly customizable lightbox for WordPress

Rado's Native Lightbox vs Simple Lightbox