14 DAY TRIAL // Ignoring a lesson that Blogger learned the hard way, WordPress.com is now introducing a new lightbox viewer for photo galleries. WordPress calls it a carousel, but it's the same feature, a way of browsing through a set of photos through a full screen viewer.
WordPress.com's carousel feature is pretty run of the mill, photos are displayed as big as the screen will allow it, you can navigate left or right and that's pretty much it.
"Photo galleries on WordPress.com are a great way to share the pictures you’ve taken with your friends, family, and your followers. But the design of your theme can limit how large your high-resolution photos are displayed," WordPress.com's Matt Thomas writes.
"Today, we’re announcing a great new way to make the most of your photos: a full-size carousel view that presents your images as large as your display can contain them," he said.
If you've seen one lightbox view, you've seen them all, using the feature is straightforward. Just click on any image in a photo gallery on a WordPress.com blog.
The image will take up the entire screen, you can click on the arrows or use the left and right arrow keys to navigate. You can get the original link for any of the images and press Escape or the 'Esc' button to close the viewer.
Blogger recently unveiled a similar feature. But it rolled it out to everyone, with no possibility of disabling it and for every image on any blog. The move caused a lot of problems for a lot of people and Blogger was eventually forced to retreat and make the feature optional.
WordPress.com is not doing exactly the same, but the feature is enabled for all galleries so there may be some people that will complain about it. It remains to be seen whether the backlash is anything on the scale Blogger got.