Those times when neat image effects were achieved with Flash are gone. jQuery has drastically changed the way developers work. Because its light-weight, easily customized and has unlimited possibilities, jQuery has become the new standard for displaying visual media on the web. For this roundup we’ve prepared 30 fresh, useful and simply awesome jQuery image and slider plugins that we’ve found this year. You’ll find some really stunning gallery solutions for every taste as well as some creative image effect plugins there.
Where can you use them? Sliders are the perfect solution for a product/work/content showcase. They don’t take up much space, are handy and look good. Look at these examples of neat slider usage.
Wunderkit
Wunderkit uses a beautiful slider to show off their app.
Premium Pixels
Premium Pixels has an unusual, yet awesome, solution. They’re using a slider in their sidebar to show premium WordPress themes.
Of course, there are other plugins in the list as well. Implementing large backgrounds, zooming images, optimizing them for retina displays – you’ll find it all below.
1. TN3 Gallery
TN3 Gallery is a powerful jQuery image gallery and WordPress plugin with slideshow, transitions effects, multiple album options, CSS skinning and much more. It’s compatible with all modern desktop and mobile browsers. It’s a premium plugin, but you can get the lite version for free.
2. Galleria
Galleria is a JavaScript image gallery framework. The aim is to simplify the process of creating professional image galleries for the web and mobile devices.
3. Adipoli
Adipoli is a simple jQuery plugin with 20+ stylish image hover effects.
4. Slidorion
A combination of an image slider and an accordion, the Slidorion displays beautiful images along with a variable length description. With slides linked to each tab, and accompanied by a large array of effects, the Slidorion is a great alternative to the traditional jQuery slider.
5. Nivo Slider
Nivo is an awesome jQuery and WordPress image slider packed with 16 transition effects, simple and clean markup and loads of settings to tweak.
6. Flexslider
An awesome, fully responsive jQuery slider plugin with simple markup, multiple slider support and custom navigation options.
7. Glisse.js
Glisse.js is a simple, responsive and fully customizable jQuery photo viewer. You’ll like the transitions between two pictures entirely assumed by CSS3.
8. Sequence
Sequence is the jQuery slider plugin with infinite style. It provides the complete functionality of a website slider without forcing you to use a set theme. In fact, Sequence has no built in theme, leaving you complete creative control to build a unique slider using only CSS3.
9. Slides
SlidesJS is a simple slideshow plugin for jQuery. Packed with a useful set of features to help novice and advanced developers alike create elegant and user-friendly slideshows.
10. Rhinoslider
Rhinoslider is the most flexible jQuery slideshow there is. You are welcome to try it yourself. Not only does it offer a variety of effects, it also allows you to add your own styles, effects and features to the slider.
11. Pikachoose
Pikachoose is a lightweight jQuery slideshow plugin, with tons of great features. jCarousel integrates smoothly with PikaChoose to give your gallery a simple and effective carousel. It can be customized in plenty of different ways.
12. Camera
Camera is a beautiful open source slideshow project. It works with all major browsers as well as mobile devices.
13. Quake Slider
Simple, easily customizable, beautiful slider with 3 color schemes and 40+ transitions.
14. bxslider
bxslider is an easy to implement jQuery custom content slider with a bunch of transition effects.
15. rcarousel
rcarousel is no longer being updated, yet it still serves it’s purpose and you can feel free to tweak it for your needs.
16. iPicture
iPicture is a jQuery Plugin to create interactive pictures with extra descriptions.
17. jCrop
Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.
18. Lazy Karl v1
The lazyKarl jQuery plugin loads a webpage’s images once they are within the user’s viewport.This is a working cross-browser lazy load jQuery plugin. Other lazy load plugins have been less than effective because some major browsers load all of the images on a page when the DOM loads.
19. jQuery.popeye
jQuery.popeye is an advanced image gallery script. 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.
20. TouchTouch
TouchTouch is a jQuery plugin that turns a collection of photos on a webpage into a touch-friendly mobile gallery. It works on all major browsers (except for IE7 and below) and most importantly is specifically designed with iOS and Android in mind.
21. Better Backgrounds
Better Backgrounds is a WordPress plugin which shows a random background image every visitor session (using a cookie), page refresh, or timed slideshow interval.
22. bgStretcher
bgStretcher jQuery plugin allows you to add a background image to page and proportionally resize it to fill entire window area.
23. Black and white
This plug-in can easily convert every colored image (in an html page) into a B&W grayscale image.
24. lake.js
Lake.js takes an img element and inserts a canvas element displaying the image and its flipped reflection directly after the img element.
25. jQuery Retina Plugin
Images that aren’t retina optimized look blown up and fuzzy on retina devices. At the moment, this is only the new iPad (aka, iPad 3), iPhone 4 and 4S. However, more and more devices will soon be retina enabled; from Android and Windows mobile devices, to OSX and Windows desktops. This is a jQuery plugin that will swap out the image source for an image that is sized for retina displays.
26. Nivo Zoom
Nivo Zoom is a jQuery image zoom plugin with 5 different zooming types, support for HTML captions and loads of settings to tweak.
27. NailThumb
Create thumbnails easily from high-res images, without any distortion, with one line of code.
28. aeImageResize
aeImageResize is a jQuery plugin to dynamically resize the images without distorting the proportions.
29. Riva Slider (premium – €19.99)
Riva Slider is the ultimate WordPress slider plugin. Create and display slideshows within minutes. No commotion and designed for ease of use, saving you tons of time to spend on things that matter.
30. HoverAlls (premium – $6)
HoverAlls is a unique jQuery animation plugin that allows you to create animation effects quickly – without any knowledge of Javascript of jQuery. With over 40 settings, HoverAlls can create unique animations for nearly any type of effect desired.
31. Zuper Responsive Multitouch Slider (premium – $10)
This Zuper Slider uses unobtrusive JavaScript and a powerful configuration panel for effects and design elements to transform a block of simple HTML markup into a beautiful elegant slider.
32. jQuery Banner Rotator (premium – $10)
jQuery banner rotator allows you to easily create powerful sliders with animated text using HTML standard tags, making the slider very easy to setup and maintain.
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