by Arno Welzel 4.9 (115 reviews)

Lightbox with PhotoSwipe

Name: Lightbox with PhotoSwipe
Rating: 4.9 (115 reviews)
Author: Arno Welzel

Integration of PhotoSwipe (http://photoswipe.com) for WordPress.

Lightbox with PhotoSwipe ranks #1,100 among WordPress.org plugins with 20,000+ active installations, is #139 of 6,336 in the Media category, a 4.9/5 rating from 115 reviews, and was last updated Aug 30, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Compatible with WP 7.1

v5.13.0 Current Version v5.13.0

Updated 2 weeks ago Last Update on 30 Aug, 2026

Refreshed 10 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#139 of 6,336 in Media Top 5% by installs Downloads -26.1% this week Actively maintained

View on WordPress.org

Rank

#1,100

— No change

Active Installs

20K+

— No change

KW Avg Position

30.2

— No change

Downloads

940K

+154 today

Support Resolved

80%

— No change

Rating

98%

Review 4.9 out of 5

4.9 (115 reviews)

Next Milestone 30K

Total Progress 98.1%

20K+ 30K+

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

Pro

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Rank Changes

Current #1,100

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

Downloads

Growth

Peak

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Reviews & Ratings

4.9

115 reviews

Overall 98%

111 (97%)

3 (3%)

0 (0%)

1 (1%)

Support Threads Overview

Resolved

Unresolved

Total Threads

Resolved

Unresolved

80%

Resolution Rate

Security History

Source: WPVulnerability

1 known vulnerability on record · 1 in the last 24 months · checked 1 week ago

Jul 13, 2026

Lightbox with PhotoSwipe [lightbox-photoswipe] < 5.9.0

CVE-2026-14833 · Fixed in v5.9.0

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Plugin Details

Version: 5.13.0
Last Updated: Aug 30, 2026
Requires WP: 6.5+
Tested Up To: 7.1
PHP Version: N/A
Author: Arno Welzel

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.9
Reviews: 115
Support Threads: 5
Resolved: 80%

Keywords

attachments gallery images lightbox photoswipe

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TL;DR

AI summary of the plugin's readme

This plugin is for WordPress site owners who want linked images in posts and pages displayed with the PhotoSwipe lightbox viewer. It solves the problem of manually integrating PhotoSwipe into WordPress, handling both gallery and single images without requiring images to link to attachment pages.

PhotoSwipe integration for WordPress
Displays linked images in lightbox
Works with galleries and single images
Shows EXIF image data
Option to fix attachment links

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Lightbox with PhotoSwipe

The plugin uses JavaScript modules for PhotoSwipe 5. This will not work, if you use any kind of "JavaScript optimizing" with a WordPress plugin which combines all frontend scripts into one single file. Make sure that Lightbox with PhotoSwipe is excluded from any kind of "optimization", otherwise the plugin may not work. Using the plugin All linked images in a post or page will be displayed using PhotoSwipe, regardless if they are part of a gallery or single images. Make sure that you link the image or gallery directly to the media and not the attachment page (in galleries the option link=file should be set). If you want to display an image in it's own lightbox which does not display other images from the same post or page, you can add the attribute data-lbwps-gid to the link element with a unique value for this image. This value must not be a number since numbers are already used internally. For example you could the file name of the image like this: <a href="myimage.jpg" data-lbwps-gid="myimage.jpg"><img src="myimage-300x300.jpg" alt="My Image" /></a> You can also add the same data-lbwps-gid attribute to multiple single images to combine them in the same lightbox. Note: the parameter was renamed from data-gallery-id to data-lbwps-gid in version 2.97 to avoid conflicts with existing themes or plugins! Starting with release 3.1.14 this is also supported for Elementor image widgets and Elementor image carousel widgets.

Please note: the order of the parameters have changed in version 1.90. Some other plugins use PhotoSwipe as well and it may be neccessary to disable Lightbox with PhotoSwipe on some pages or posts - for example on the product pages of WooCommerce. You can either configure the pages/posts manually in the settings or you can use the filter lbwps_enabled. This filter gets the ID of the current page/post and if the lightbox is currently enabled (true or false). If the filter returns true, the lightbox will be used, if it returns false the lightbox will be disabled - which means, no scripts and stylesheets will be included at all on the current page/post. Example: // Disable Lightbox with PhotoSwipe on WooCommerce product pages function my_lbwps_enabled($enabled, $id) { if (function_exists('is_product')) { if (is_product()) return false; } return $enabled; } add_filter('lbwps_enabled', 'my_lbwps_enabled', 10, 2);

The individual parts of the caption can be modified using the following filters. Each filter gets the ID of the current page/post and the original text to be used. You can either return the text as it is or modify it if needed. lbwps_caption_caption lbwps_caption_title lbwps_caption_description lbwps_caption_filename lbwps_caption_exif Example: // Add copyright notice to caption title function my_lbwps_caption_title($title, $id) { return sprintf('%s<br>Copyright (c) %s Foobar', $title, date('Y')); } add_filter('lbwps_caption_title', 'my_lbwps_caption_title', 10, 2); Changes with PhotoSwipe 5 PhotoSwipe 5 improves the overall performance and compatibility with newer mobile devices like the iPhone 13. However, some features are no longer supported by that version: 1) Customizing the display of image counter and zoom button (this may be added in future updates). 2) All mobile specific options (some options may return in future updates). 3) Sharing options (some options may return in future updates).

Please use the web developer tools of your browser to examine the caption elements and to learn which CSS classes are used.

PhotoSwipe has the option to create a zoom animation from the thumbnail to the final image when opening the lightbox. However, this does not work well with square thumbnails since the thumbnail is just enlarged to the final image size without keeping its aspect ratio. This would result in a quite weird image display where a square thumbnail gets stretched to a portrait or landscape image before the final image is loaded. Just having a fade-in animation is the better solution. Conflict with PublishPress Blocks (Advanced Gutenberg Blocks) Lightbox with PhotoSwipe works fine with Gutenberg gallery blocks as well. However when you use the "PublishPress Blocks" plugin it brings its own lightbox script which can cause conflicts. To avoid any problems, you should disable the Advanced Gutenberg lightbox in the settings. Disable the option "Open galleries in lightbox" in the backend configuration of PublishPress Blocks.

If you want to display the images not in the order in which they are in the source code you can use the attribute tabindex in the image links. Also see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/tabindex on how to use this attribute.

SVG is a vector based format and SVG images can be displayed at any size. However PhotoSwipe needs to know the size of an image to be able to display it in the lightbox. Lightbox with PhotoSwipe tries to determine the size based on the width/height attribute of the root element in the SVG structure. If these attributes are not available, the viewbox is used. If none of these values are present, the SVG can not be displayed in the lightbox. Reading SVG files also requires the SimpleXML extension for PHP to be available. Without this extension SVG files can not be displayed at all. Licensing To avoid any confusion: this plugin was published with the agreement of Dmytro Semenov. Source and contributing If you change any of the stylesheets or frontend scripts in the assets folder you need to run make build to generate new compressed frontend assets. The main repository for the source code can be found at https://codeberg.org/askaaron/lightbox-photoswipe.