I’ve had my share of experiences with lightbox plugins for WordPress.

I started with Lightbox Plus, which worked nicely until I switched from version 2.0 to a newer version, which would cause an error message and keep my WP installation from running properly. I’ve just re-checked the latest version, it still doesn’t work.

Today, I noticed that the old version (2.0) of Lightbox Plus doesn’t seem to work any longer with the latest WordPress 3.1 (to which I just updated). I don’t know why, I’m not an expert on this, but it did work with the previous version of WordPress, so I guess it’s simply incompatible. As the latest version of Lightbox Plus doesn’t work either (at least on my installation — see above), updating was no option.

So I tried Lightbox 2. Sleek and simple, but it would neither show the image titles, nor would it let me scroll through all the images on one page — in order to show the next consecutive image, I would have to close the lightbox and click the on the next image to open it in a new lightbox.

So I tried Simple Lightbox. Less simple than Lightbox 2, with a few options to choose from, but I couldn’t change any settings. Now it would show image titles, but still not scroll through the images on a page.

So I tried WP jQuery Lightbox. And finally! A simple lightbox plugin without many options to choose from (which doesn’t matter for me anyway). An elegant, simple design that shows the image titles, has a close button and scrolls through all the images on one page. I am very pleased with this plugin and can highly recommend it. Just install it, and it’ll work. As simple as that.