About this plugin
Rado’s Native Lightbox instantly upgrades every WordPress gallery into a beautiful, full-screen lightbox carousel. Just activate and go — your existing galleries are transformed automatically, no shortcodes to learn, no settings pages to configure.
Built on Native Carousel, it uses the browser’s own scroll-snapping instead of heavy animation libraries. The result is buttery-smooth swiping on phones, fluid keyboard navigation on desktops, and a total footprint of roughly 13 KB — smaller than a single thumbnail image.
Why this plugin?
- Zero configuration — activate it and every gallery on your site becomes a lightbox carousel. Deactivate it and galleries revert to normal. Nothing is written to your database.
- Truly lightweight — ~13 KB total (JS + CSS). No jQuery, no frameworks, no external requests. Your PageSpeed score stays intact.
- Works with any theme — Twenty Twenty-Five, Astra, GeneratePress, or anything else. The plugin bundles everything it needs.
- Accessible by default — full keyboard navigation, focus trapping in the lightbox, screen-reader labels on every control, and prefers-reduced-motion support.
- Native scroll-snap — hardware-accelerated, 60 fps swiping powered by the browser itself, not JavaScript animation loops.
- Dark mode aware — the lightbox overlay adapts to the visitor’s system color scheme automatically.
Features at a glance:
- Full-screen lightbox with swipe, keyboard and mouse-wheel navigation
- Compact thumbnail index strip with scrollable overflow
- “Thumbnails only” toggle in both the Block Editor sidebar and Classic Editor settings
- Endless (infinite loop) navigation
- Lazy-loaded images with low-resolution placeholder blur while loading
- Captions and alt text fully preserved
- Featured-image click opens the matching gallery slide on single posts
- Editor performance guard — caps image sizes in the block editor to prevent crashes with large galleries
How it works:
The plugin intercepts gallery rendering at display time and outputs Native Carousel HTML markup. Your post content is never modified — the transformation is purely visual and fully reversible.
Third-party source code
0-or-later).
- Homepage & documentation: https://nativecarousel.com/
- Source code repository: https://github.com/radogado/n-carousel
The following files in assets/ are the minified production builds:
- n-carousel.min.js — carousel runtime
- n-carousel-preload.min.js — image preloader
- n-carousel.min.css — carousel styles
The unminified, human-readable source is available in the GitHub repository linked above. css and the admin JavaScript files are shipped unminified and readable.
This plugin is also maintained as part of the niui theme project:
com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox