I've been meaning to search for some mechanism to zoom an image on the current browser page for some time but just finally got around to it today. This is to allow someone to see a bigger version of an image used in a gallery or web page without reloading the whole page, spawning a new page or a pop-up.

One of my first results was HighSlide JS

It does a ton of cool stuff, including text captions, manual slideshow controls (next prev), the ability to move the image around and it can even be used for predominantly text-based content.

I'd like to know if anyone else has any favorite tools to accomplish this type of page manipulation? This one costs $29 for one site or $179 for unlimited sites. Free for non-commercial use though.

Impressive stuff!

Oh, just in case I didn't make it clear, I *am* looking for alternatives, not just trying to hype this solution.

I did a bit more searching around and so far I still like this one the best. Another very popular zooming script is called Lightbox JS - of which there are a ton of variants.

If you want to see that script in action on a finished page full of gallery images, take a look at the site I just put up:

http://17gully.com

I've created my own custom control overlay and control buttons (because I thought the stock ones looked like poop )

The larger thumbnails are 3:2 and the small ones are 4:3, but either expand out to various other sizes. I'm using different images for the thumbs than for the final expanded, but could have used the same for both. It would have relied on the browser's image scaling though and added a longer page loading for the initial display.

Bottom line is I looked and looked and didn't find any script better than this one. I'll probably end up buying the unlimited commercial use version for my business.

The site linked above is a gallery of images to help sell my home. I need to insert some text into the white space under the main headers as well as the room dimensions into the image captions, along with a link to our home's profile on the http://bytheowner.com real estate site where our main listing is.

That's a fantastic looking site. Well done. Very impressive. I'd buy the house after seeing that. Great photography, too.

Minor bug report: When I hover over the images for some of the interior rooms, the "hover" text (the text defined by the ALT tag of the images) still says things like "front of house" or "back yard".

Thanks for pointing that out. I still need to edit all the alt text (the stuff that you see when you hover) but had momentarily forgotten all about it. It doesn't appear in Camino which is Mozilla though. All the hover text in this browser says "Click to zoom in" because it's instead displaying the "title" text of the anchor link.

Some of the images took 12 photographs to make. I shot a lot of them using exposure bracketing and then combining them into High Dynamic Range composites. A number then also required stitching together to form a sort of mini panorama, which I composited by hand in Photoshop because I didn't actually take the photos as proper panos and have never used any pano software yet. This was the only way to get the scope needed to show off some of the rooms because I don't have a wide-angle lens on the camera I'm using.

Oh, that high dynamic range trick is awesome, I have a friend who showed me some photos he did with that technique. Very impressive stuff.