FancyBox for WordPress turns the images you already have into a lightbox gallery. Activate it and every image that links to a full-size file opens in an overlay instead of loading a new page — in posts, pages, widgets and the block editor’s gallery blocks, with no shortcodes and nothing to add to your content.

If the defaults suit you, there is nothing to configure.

What you get out of the box

Click any linked image to open it in an overlay, with the rest of the page dimmed behind it
Arrow keys, on-screen arrows, swipe on touch devices, and Escape to close
Zoom, slideshow, thumbnail strip and full-screen controls in the toolbar
Captions taken from the image title, the block editor’s caption, or a data-caption attribute
Galleries grouped automatically — everything on the page, per post, or per gallery block
PDFs, videos and other pages open in the lightbox too

What you can change

Settings live under Settings Fancybox for WP, split into Appearance, Animations, Behaviour, Galleries and Misc:

Overlay colour and opacity, padding, border, background colour
Caption position (inside the frame, over the image, or below it), size and colour
Opening and transition animations, and their speed
Close on overlay click, close on image click, zoom on click, mouse-wheel navigation, looping
Turn the lightbox off on mobile, on WooCommerce shop pages, or on product pages
Exclude PDF links, or exclude individual images with class="nolightbox"
A custom jQuery expression if you want to decide exactly which links are affected

Built on FancyBox 3

The plugin bundles FancyBox 3.5.7. Nothing is loaded from an external CDN, so no visitor data leaves your site. The bundled copy is namespaced (fancyboxforwp) so it will not collide with a FancyBox that your theme or another plugin already loads.

Translations

Available in your language through WordPress.org language packs. Translations are contributed by the community at translate.wordpress.org — help for your locale is very welcome.

Contributing

Development happens on GitHub. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.

This plugin is developed and maintained by Colorlib, who also make free WordPress themes.

If it is useful to you, a review genuinely helps.