Just started a project for a friend of mine showcasing their design work and one piece of functionality that I’ll need is a JS based lightbox in order to display the work in a nice way.

My requirements for the lightbox were…

• Small file size for all included files
• As few HTTP requests as possible, i.e. for images, CSS, JS libraries
• Support for image sets
• Preferably uses a JS library I have used before (YUI, scriptaculous, mootools)
• Degrades gracefully if the user doesn’t have JS

I have found a cheeky little comparison matrix of lightbox alternatives, meaning I can stop running around the net using the various names that people have given their spinoffs of the first lightbox, check it out, it will definitely save you a lot of time!