Plogins Reel – Product Gallery Zoom & Video for WooCommerce

Reel upgrades the WooCommerce single product gallery with product image zoom, an accessible gallery lightbox and a featured product video:

• Hover zoom. Gallery images magnify on hover at a zoom scale you set (1.0× to 3.0×). The transform is clipped to the gallery frame, so the rest of the page stays put.
• Accessible lightbox. Click, or press Enter/Space, on any gallery image to open it full screen. The lightbox is keyboard-operable: Tab stays on the close button so focus can’t slip behind the overlay, Escape closes it, and focus returns to the image you opened. It’s a fixed overlay that starts hidden, so it reserves no space until used.
• Featured video. Show a per-product video, a self-hosted MP4/WebM file or a YouTube/Vimeo (oEmbed) URL, after the gallery or before the product summary. The video sits in a 16:9 frame sized with aspect-ratio, so its space is held before it loads.

The markup is built in PHP and progressively enhanced by one vanilla-JavaScript file (no jQuery), deferred and loaded in the footer. Scripts and styles only enqueue on the single product page.

Settings live under a top-level Reel admin menu. Each of the three features has its own on/off switch; you can also set the zoom scale and skip it on touch devices, show an alt-text caption in the lightbox, relabel the open-image control for screen readers, and choose the video’s position, autoplay, heading and intro text. The per-product video URL is set on the Reel tab in the product editor, with an optional heading for that product.

To place the video somewhere other than the gallery area, drop the [reel_video] shortcode (it takes id and title attributes) into any product content. It renders the current product’s video in the same 16:9 frame.

Source and issue tracker: https://github.com/wppoland/plogins-reel, the plugin is developed in the open, so bug reports and pull requests are welcome there.

Documentation and links

• Documentation – https://plogins.com/reel/docs/
• Plugin page – https://plogins.com/reel/
• Source code – https://github.com/wppoland/plogins-reel
• Bug reports and feature requests – https://github.com/wppoland/plogins-reel/issues

Features

• Gallery image hover zoom with a configurable scale.
• Accessible, keyboard-operable full-screen lightbox (Escape / backdrop close).
• Featured product video (self-hosted or oEmbed) with selectable position.
• [reel_video] shortcode to place the video anywhere.
• Optional lightbox caption from the image alt text.
• Skip hover zoom on touch devices (where hover is unreliable).
• Custom accessible label for the open-in-lightbox control.
• Default video heading and optional intro paragraph.
• Reserved-space markup throughout, so no Cumulative Layout Shift.
• No jQuery; one deferred, in-footer script loaded only on product pages.
• Independent on/off toggle for each feature.
• “Settings” link on the plugins list; clean uninstall removes plugin options.
• Translation-ready: bundled .pot template plus a Polish (pl_PL) translation.
• HPOS and cart/checkout blocks compatible.

Plogins Reel PRO

The free edition upgrades the WooCommerce gallery: zoom, lightbox and self-hosted video. Plogins Reel PRO adds richer video and per-variation media:

• Per-variation gallery – a distinct image and video set that swaps in when the shopper selects a variation
• Video autoplay rules – control when and how product videos autoplay

Everything in the free edition stays free and open. Plogins Reel PRO starts at 19 EUR per year (PLN shown at checkout).

Compare editions and pricing: https://plogins.com/plogins-reel-pro/pricing/

External Services

Reel makes no API calls or analytics requests of its own; the zoom, lightbox and self-hosted video features run entirely on your site, and the only data Reel stores is the reel_settings and reel_db_version options plus each product’s _reel_video_url and _reel_video_title meta.

The one exception is when you set a product’s video URL to a YouTube, Vimeo or other oEmbed link. In that case WordPress core’s own wp_oembed_get() fetches the embed markup from that provider, sending the video URL to the provider you chose so it can return the player; Reel caches the result in a transient to avoid repeat requests. No request is made for self-hosted (MP4/WebM) videos. Use of those providers is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, e.g. YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms, https://policies.google.com/privacy) and Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/terms, https://vimeo.com/privacy).

Translations

Plogins Reel includes Polish, German and Spanish translations for the plugin interface. The text domain is plogins-reel, so WordPress.org language packs can also override or extend these bundled translations.