#328 by installs
Responsive Lightbox & Gallery
The most popular lightbox plugin and responsive gallery builder for WordPress.
- Installs
- 100,000+
- Rating
- 4.9 (2K)
- Updated
- 11 days ago
FancyBox for WordPress
Seamlessly integrates FancyBox lightbox into your WordPress blog: Upload, activate, and you're done. Additional configuration optional.
- Active installs
- 30,000+
- #946 of 1,000
- Downloads, all time
- 2M
- 1,983,109
- Downloads, 30 days
- 5.3K
- 1.4K in the last 7
- Rating
- 4.6 / 5
- 92 reviews
- Last updated
- 3 months ago
- Aug 7, 2026
- Version
- 3.4.2
- 62 releases
Upkeep and compatibility
| Last updated | August 7, 2026Updated in the last 3 months |
|---|---|
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.0.8Older than WordPress 7.1.4, the current release |
| Needs WordPress | 5.6 or newer |
| Needs PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| First published | February 6, 2009 |
| Support, last two months | 0 of 1 threads resolved (0%) |
Reviews
4.6 / 5 from 92 reviews
| 5 stars | 76 |
|---|---|
| 4 stars | 6 |
| 3 stars | 2 |
| 2 stars | 1 |
| 1 star | 7 |
Downloads, last 30 days
What the author says it does
FancyBox for WordPress turns the images you already have into a lightbox gallery. Activate it and every image that links to a full-size file opens in an overlay instead of loading a new page — in posts, pages, widgets and the block editor’s gallery blocks, with no shortcodes and nothing to add to your content.
If the defaults suit you, there is nothing to configure.
What you get out of the box
- Click any linked image to open it in an overlay, with the rest of the page dimmed behind it
- Arrow keys, on-screen arrows, swipe on touch devices, and Escape to close
- Zoom, slideshow, thumbnail strip and full-screen controls in the toolbar
- Captions taken from the image title, the block editor’s caption, or a data-caption attribute
- Galleries grouped automatically — everything on the page, per post, or per gallery block
- PDFs, videos and other pages open in the lightbox too
What you can change
Settings live under Settings → Fancybox for WP, split into Appearance, Animations, Behaviour, Galleries and Misc:
- Overlay colour and opacity, padding, border, background colour
- Caption position (inside the frame, over the image, or below it), size and colour
- Opening and transition animations, and their speed
- Close on overlay click, close on image click, zoom on click, mouse-wheel navigation, looping
The opening of the plugin's own description. The full text, installation notes and changelog are on its WordPress.org page.
Questions the author answers
How do I add a caption?
Three ways, and they stack:
- Set the image’s Title in the media library or block settings — it appears under the image.
- Add a caption in the block editor — it is picked up automatically.
• Add data-caption to the link for longer or formatted text:
Basic HTML such as <br>, <em> and <a> is allowed. Captions are sanitised before display, so scripts and event handlers are stripped.
How do I stop one image opening in the lightbox?
Add class="nolightbox" to the link. Links from Envira Gallery and NextGen Gallery are skipped automatically so the two lightboxes do not fight.
The lightbox looks wrong — the image is cut off, stretched, or barely visible
Almost always another plugin or theme loading its own copy of FancyBox. Two stylesheets defining the same class names will fight, because FancyBox’s CSS class names are shared.
To check, open your browser’s developer tools, look at the Network tab, and search for fancybox. If you see a .css file from anywhere other than /plugins/fancybox-for-wordpress/, that is the conflict.
Images loaded by infinite scroll or lazy loading do not open
Fixed in 3.4.1. Thumbnails added after the page has finished loading — infinite scroll, lazy loading, AJAX filters — are now detected and bound automatically. Update if you are on an older version.
Can I load the lightbox only on certain pages?
Yes, with a filter. Put this in your theme’s functions.php or a site-specific plugin:
add_filter( 'mfbfw_is_enabled', function ( $enabled ) { return is_page( array( 'portfolio', 'gallery' ) ); } );
Returning false means nothing loads at all — no CSS, no JavaScript. There are also built-in switches for mobile, WooCommerce shop pages and product pages under Behaviour.
PDFs open in the lightbox. How do I stop that?
Turn on Exclude PDF files under Behaviour and PDF links will open normally.
Note that iOS Safari cannot display a PDF inside an overlay at all. If your visitors are mostly on iPhones or iPads, excluding PDFs is the more reliable choice.
Latest changelog entry
Fixed: The lightbox could collapse to a thin sliver instead of showing the image, and videos played sound with no picture. The plugin’s stylesheet carried a height: auto !important rule that overrode the height FancyBox calculates for each slide. On its own it happened to work, but as soon as a second copy of FancyBox’s CSS was on the page – any theme or plugin bundling its own – the content box collapsed to nothing. The rule was added in 3.2.5 for a problem that no longer exists, and has been removed.
Screenshots
An image open in the lightbox, with its caption, navigation arrows and toolbar. 
Appearance settings — overlay, padding, border, caption position and colours. 
Gallery settings — group every image on the page, each gallery block, each post, or write your own expression. 
Behaviour settings — closing, zoom, mouse wheel, WooCommerce, PDFs and mobile.
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Where this page's numbers come from
Read from the WordPress.org plugin API on , when WordPress 7.1.4 was the current release. WordPress.org rounds active installs into buckets. These are the directory's figures, not my verdict, and I haven't tested this plugin.