I recently released the Full Screen Galleries WordPress Plugin. It automatically creates a full-screen slideshow of post content images and galleries. The slideshow provides an enhanced format for browsing large collections of images. Viewers can focus on a single image at a time, see larger images, and also read captions more deliberately. Navigation is simplified to change the image like a slide instead of in a long vertical-scroll format. The plugin is a must-have for photography and portfolio sites.

This plugin has been on my to do list for a long time. Its primary benefit is that it’s automatic — it “just works” when the plugin is active without any adjustments to existing post content. Sites like my photography blog (which was my primary incentive for building this plugin) get an instant upgrade for their existing libraries of content. I also updated the Arbutus theme that runs my photography site to integrate with Full Screen Galleries. You can see a demo on any single post view on my photography blog, like this one.

Process

I considered several (more complicated) approaches to building the plugin over the six years that it sat waiting as an idea on a list of ideas. Over the years, improvements in WordPress core enabled a simpler final product. Nearly all of the data that the plugin needs is already available in the post markup that the block editor generates. From this data, a few final details are silently loaded via Ajax once visitors open the slideshow. Layers of compatibility fallbacks optimize user experience for older post content data formats. The emphasis on accessibility also involves extensive JavaScript logic to optimize slideshow navigation for a wide range of input types. Yet the technical footprint is relatively small and has minimal impact on initial page load time.

For further reading, see Justin Tadlock’s review on WP Tavern.