15+ jQuery Plugins to Create Stunning Image Zoom Effects

jQuery is amazing and you can find plugins to address nearly any need a front end developer may have. This post cover jQuery Plugins to create Stunning Image Zoom Effects on your site or blog. This is very useful if you have large images that will otherwise take up too much space.

jQuery is very powerful and as you learn more about you will be amazed what it is capable of. While there are great tutorials, guidelines, free plugins etc. all over the Internet I personally prefer to read a old style book when I work myself into a new area. This reference book for jQuery is really great to have around when you work with jQuery:

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide. In this book you will be provided information about the latest features of jQuery that include Sizzle Selector, Native event delegation, Event triggering, DOM manipulation, and many more. You won’t be confined to built-in functionality, you’ll be able to examine jQuery’s plug-in architecture and we discuss both how to use plug-ins and how to write your own. If you’re already familiar with JavaScript programming, this book will help you dive right into advanced jQuery concepts. You’ll be able to experiment on your own, trusting the pages of this book to provide information on the intricacies of the library, where and when you need it.

jQuery gzoom plugin

Really nice image zoom plugin with the following features: click on plus and minus to zoom, drag the slider to zoom Zoom using mousewheel hover the image, Moving mouse hover the image change the pan, Click on the image to show in lightbox style

Hover Zoom

The hover zoom effect basically reverse zooms an image while fading in a label on top of it when the mouse hovers over it. It makes for a pretty slick effect which could be used on thumbnails. As always, you can check out a demo or grab the source right here if you don’t want to read the entire tutorial.

AnythingZoomer jQuery Plugin

You have a small area. You mouse over it. An area pops up giving you a zoomed in closer look. This is a jQuery plugin that does it. I’m not going to tell you what you should use it for or elaborate use-case scenarios. Your own creativity can help you there. Demo & Download

JQZoom

JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework.jQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.

jQuery Cycle plugin

This is a lightweight slideshow plugin that supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and many transition effects. The effects look very good!

crop, labelOver and pluck

Crop-Gives your visitors the power to crop any image on the fly using JavaScript only. Also there are 2 other plugins: LabelOver and Pluck.

ImgAreaSelect

imgAreaSelect is a jQuery plugin for selecting a rectangular area of an image.

Jcrop

Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.

PHP & jQuery image upload and crop

Awesome solution for allowing users to upload and crop images on your site.

PanView

This plugin allows your visitors view details of a big image and move around with the mouse.

Zoomer Gallery

GalleryView is a plugin that allows you to easily transform your image lists into beautiful galleries with Flash-like zoom effects in them. It’s a simple yet elegant way of giving your interfaces a nice little shine and at only 2KB in size, it’s both compact and surprisingly easy to use.

Other resources

A New WordPress Slideshow Plugin Creates Beautiful Slideshows in a Snap! – Basically it’s an easy to use photo slideshow player developed for WordPress users and it allows your to create beautiful slideshow galleries in minutes all without leaving the WordPress admin area.