Recently, we were looking at designing yet another image gallery and wanted to go beyond the stock standard and try something completely different. Looking for inspiration on the Internet Ajax was mentioned again and again and I was pleasantly surprised at what's already out there. Let's take a look at some inspirational galleries with a twist of Ajax.

LightBox2
We were pointed in the direction of Lightbox2. Lightbox is an Ajax application which utilises JavaScript and CSS to build a pretty impressive and flexible Gallery. It is available free for download from the author's site, although he does, quite rightly, ask for a donation for it's use. What you do in that regard is up to you but it is definitely worth a token payment at least.

You download the source files which consist of the various JavaScripts, the CSS file, some examples images and a HTML file which explains how to put it together and customise your gallery. This isn't rocket science, it's a fast and effective way to put a gallery together because all the hard work is done for you.

Let's take a look at an example gallery from Lightbox2 ... try clicking on one of the images below and then make sure you mouseover the top left and right corners to view the other images in the gallery:

Pretty slick eh. You can customise the colour of the translucent background and the lightbox colour itself, change the images used for Prev / Next / Exit and just about anything really. I like the way different image sizes can be used and the way it's so easy to pop into an existing page.

HoverBox
While I was googling Lightbox I came across another interesting gallery example which you can download here ... the author of this one says he was inspired by Lightbox but wanted to make something without JavaScript ... the result is below.