If you use a lot of images in your blog, you’ll definitely want to have a Lightbox plugin to jazz up the previews and display of your images.

To give you an example of how this works, click on any of the thumbnails below and you’ll see the lightbox preview window, with the ability to browse all the images.

To do this effortlessly on your WordPress blog, you need to download the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress, and upload the entire folder to your plugins directory.

Then, activate the plugin and go to the “Options” page (or the “Settings” page in WordPress 2.5). Here you can select different color schemes but after trying all of them I still prefer the default “black” color scheme.

To activate the lightbox effect, you need to add this code to every link you create:

rel="lightbox"

Of course this can be automated using another brilliant plugin called the “Add Lightbox” plugin. Once you install this plugin, all thumbnail images linked to the source image will automatically use the lightbox preview codes.

If you’re a photographer or have an image-heavy blog, this will make your site seem much cooler!