15 Best jQuery Image Galleries

A lot of websites which sell some kind of product or services will have images or videos to showcase how good they are at their job. How you present your awesome work to prospective clients plays an important role in determining how your revenue grows over the years.

If you have a basic knowledge of website creation, you can easily use jQuery-based gallery plugins to create amazing portfolios to woo prospective clients.

In this post, I will list some of the best jQuery image galleries that you can use to group your best work together in a unique and interesting manner.

Cube Portfolio—Responsive jQuery Grid Plugin

The first plugin in our list is Cube Portfolio. It is based on jQuery and presents your content in form of a grid. The items can be laid out in masonary or mosaic format. You can also present them in a slider if you want to.

Here are some of its features:

responsive layout with built-in lightbox that supports images, YouTube and Vimeo
fully customizable with over 30 different options to make it unique for your site
19 starter templates with powerful API
22 different animations for grid items and 15 different animations for captions

Cube Portfolio is an incredible plugin that will give your website a professional look. Make sure you try the different settings for captions and animation filters in the demo.

XPANDA—Responsive Gallery Content Expander Plugin

If the main focus of your gallery is images, you cannot go wrong with the XPANDA responsive gallery plugin. It allows you to lay out all your images in 4 different basic formats and make them the center of attention.

A few interesting features of the plugin are:

responsive design
built-in image lazyloader for both thumbnails and large images
beautiful animations for expanding and collapsing items

As an added bonus, XPANDA gives you a free Photoshop action to blur and resize images with very low file size.

Users will be able to click on the images and read more details about them. Check out the demo to see how you can use it to create image galleries, team pages or portfolios.

Responsive Grid Gallery—Horizontal and Vertical

If you are looking for a basic grid-based image gallery, your search ends here. People who want to simply showcase their images and don’t have any extra content to go with it will like this plugin.

The images are laid out in a grid format and you can choose between a horizontal, vertical or full width layout.

Here are some of its features:

fully responsive image grid
hover effects to make the gallery more dynamic
ability to filter images
overlay social share icons over the images

The Responsive grid gallery is very easy to set up so you will be up and running in no time. Try the demo and see if it is a right fit for your project.

Sharp Gallery

This plugin is a great choice if you want to display a lot of images in grid layout. You can also display some extra content that goes with each image directly within the grid.

The plugin is very light weight at about 16KB minified size, so it will load quickly.

Some noteworthy features of this plugin are:

12 different templates to create your gallery layout
40 different settings that control everything from thumbnail width to animation
fully responsive with cross-browser support

Sharp Gallery has been designed with ease of installation in mind. It won’t take you long to get started with this gallery. You should try out all the 12 templates in the demo to get a better understanding of the plugin features.

Gridzy—Responsive and Justified Image Grid Gallery

Gridzy is a very easy-to-use image gallery plugin that offers all the basic features one can expect. You can set everything up and have a fully functional gallery in about 10 minutes.

Here are some of its awesome features:

fully responsive with cross-browser compatibility
incredibly easy to set up
many configurable options
lazy loading improves performance

Gridzy has a 5 star average rating, so you can be sure about getting a quality product. Check out the demo video to see it in action.

FullScreen Background Gallery for Image and Video

People who are looking for a more immersive experience for their image and video galleries should give this plugin in a try. The images will cover the entire screen of the devices allowing the visitors to focus entirely on the content.

Here are some of its amazing features:

support for playback of YouTube and Vimeo videos
option to lay texture over images
over 40 different settings to customize the plugin

FullScreen Background/Gallery is a fantastic plugin for people who want to give their users a distraction free experience when scrolling through images. Take a look at the demos of images and videos with customization options.

Real3D FlipBook

This a unique plugin and is completely different from everything else in the list. You can use it as an image gallery that allows people to scroll through images like they are flipping book pages.

Here are just a few of the many features of this plugin:

fully customizable—change everything from menu color to button shapes and sizes
pages can be interactive with links
fully responsive and optimized for mobile

Real3D FlipBook plugin tries to mimic the feel of flipping through a book as closely as possible. Flip through some sample books to see if it appeals to you.

JQuery Thumbnail Gallery With LightBox

This gallery plugin comes with an integrated lightbox to make the image a user is currently looking at stand out. There is an option to scroll through images vertically which makes this plugin unique among the list.

The feature list includes but is not limited to:

responsive design with ability to restrict the image width and height if needed
two layout options and two navigation options
ability to embed videos in the gallery

The jQuery Thumbnail gallery is definitely worth considering if you want to experiment with different modes of scrolling and navigation. There are 16 different demos which show grid- and line-based layouts.

jQuery MultiTransition Gallery Sliders

This plugin is simply amazing if you want to create a full screen image gallery with catchy transitions.

You can layout the image thumbnails in any direction you want and choose if they should be overlaid on the main page itself.

There are many other useful features in the plugin:

adding HTML captions on each slide
multiple transition effects for photos
support for HTML5 audio and video
public methods and callbacks for full control

Image galleries created using jQuery MultiTransition are actually very impressive, go take a look at the demos if you don’t believe me.

Jquery Multimedia Gallery Slideshow with Music

This multimedia gallery plugin can lay images out in a large variety of formats from small thumbnails to large ones as well horizontal and vertical directions. You can also integrate music in your gallery along with the option to enable automatic scrolling through images.

The following list of features make this plugin incredibly powerful:

ability to create music playlists
API to control the image gallery as well as music playback
integrate images with a link, title and lightbox plugin

This jQuery Multimedia Gallery plugin gives you many options to layout images. As shown in the demos, it works well in both responsive and fix-width settings.

Boxaroo Adaptive Lightbox

Anyone who is looking for a lightbox-based gallery will find that Boxaroo is among the best in this category.

You don’t need a lot of coding experience and are good to go after adjusting the value of a single setting. After that, you can choose from 170 different options to make sure that it fits your project needs perfectly.

Here is a list of some of its incredible features:

preloaders, captions and counter for each image lightbox
navigation buttons and background overlays
2D and 3D special effects with lighting control

Check out the demo page of Boxaroo to learn more about the plugin and its features.

Youtube Vimeo Gallery Background

If you are creating a purely video-based gallery, this plugin will be a perfect fit. It is designed specifically with videos in mind.

Here is a small set of features that make this plugin amazing:

automatically generate thumbnails, titles and video descriptions
multiple layout options with an optional playlist
no extra elements to distract from the video
options to play video automatically, loop videos, or play in random order

The YouTube Vimeo Gallery plugin gives you a simple way of integrating videos in your galleries. You should try out all of its 9 demos to see how it works with different settings.

ModuloBox—NextGen Lightbox JavaScript Plugin

The animations offered with this plugin are incredibly smooth and feel very natural. There is no jerky motion and scrolling through different images is a pleasurable experience.

Here is a small list of its impressive features:

Multi-touch gesture support: it supports pinch, double tab and drag gestures making it very mobile friendly.
You can implement infinite scrolling, thumbnail navigation and slideshow or fullscreen mode.
You are able to mix content types in your galleries.

ModuloBox uses Physics based animations to scroll through the gallery. Make sure you check all its demos to see how smooth and natural it feels.

Responsive Bootstrap Portfolio And Lightbox

This plugin is a really good choice if you are looking for a Bootstrap-compatible gallery. It works with both Bootstrap 3 and Bootstrap 4.

The gallery items can be laid out in two, three, four, five, or six columns according to your preference. The layout of gallery items and the lightboxes in the plugin is very clean and professional.

This following features are only a small subset of what this plugin actually offers:

18 different light boxes and 7 color schemes
responsive and mobile friendly multi-column layout
support for integrating videos and images in same gallery

Responsive Bootstrap Portfolio comes with everything that you might be looking for in a gallery plugin. Don’t forget to check out the demos to see how amazing it looks.

LC Lightbox—Premium jQuery Plugin

This plugin is loaded with functionality that you would not find or expect in many other gallery plugins.

It has all the common features like thumbnail navigation, slideshow and title and descriptions for each gallery item. However, it also comes with progressive zoom and comment integration.

Here are some other features that make this plugin truly awesome:

3 preset skins and 4 different layouts
mouse and keyboard based navigation
ability to mix multiple content types
dynamic element tracking

The list of does not end here. LC Lightbox has a lot more to offer which you can read about on its demo page.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we have covered the 15 best jQuery image galleries that you can integrate in your websites in a couple of minutes. Hopefully, they will cover all your needs like creating an image gallery, a portfolio or a mixed collection of images and videos. There are a lot more plugins and scripts available in the Envato Market in case nothing in this list matches what you need.

If you still can’t find an image gallery plugin of your choice, we can help you create one on your own. Just learn the basics of JavaScript from some of the different tutorials and courses offered in this website and you will be good to go. And check out some of our other tutorials on jQuery media plugins!