The Lumebox is an Open-Source (GPL) Lightbox clone written as a JavaScript jQuery plugin with a few added features. One of the main features is that it can parse RSS feeds just as easily as displaying images. The plugin searches the post or page for links leading to images (and RSS-feeds) and opens them in a popup instead of following them.

There are a couple of major new features in version 2.0, the first is that it uses the Google Ajax Feed API to pull RSS-feeds (no need for local proxies for feeds on other domains), the second is that the next image in queue to be displayed is now preloaded. Lots of small improvements are also made, particularly in scaling, positioning and transforming the images.

The plugin was started as a project in the Research and Development initiative within Sogeti which lets its consultants work with a variety of projects when they are in between customer objects. The Lumebox project was started on my initiative to gain more experience in creating Open Source tools and utilities.

The Lumebox plugin is released under the GNU GPL and can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.