Your blog design will come with some natural constraints. Your content area is of a certain width, so the images that you embed should not exceed this width. In the past, the way that you’d be able to show larger pictures to your readers is to direct them to another page where they can see the bigger picture. That’s not the case anymore, thanks to the relatively simple advent of the lightbox.

This isn’t completely novel at this point, of course, but it’s great to see how easy it is to implement a lightbox solution on your WordPress blog. Rather than send a reader to another page on your site, they can remain on the same page, click on the thumbnail, and be shown the photograph at a much higher resolution and size. This is similar to the lightbox effect you get when you hit the Upload/Insert Image tool from within the WordPress “Add New Post” dashboard.

One of the easier ways to implement a lightbox on your blog is to use a WordPress plug-in called Lightbox Plus. The plug-in is designed in such a way that when a reader clicks on the thumbnail, the background surrounding the larger image will dim. This adds to visibility and usability. When they are done viewing the image, they can click anywhere in the dimmed portion to return to reading your blog post.

For more information, including a FAQ, screenshots, and a changelog, check out the Lightbox Plus page in the WordPress repository. It is also there that you can download this plug-in.