Rado's Native Lightbox

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

This plugin bundles minified assets from Native Carousel, an open-source carousel component (GPL-2.0-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. No build tools are needed to work with this plugin’s own code — gallery-lightbox.css and the admin JavaScript files are shipped unminified and readable.

This plugin is also maintained as part of the niui theme project: https://gitlab.com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox