Nivo Zoom is a Lightbox-like but simpler image zooming jQuery plugin from the developers of the popular Nivo Slider.

The plugin is lightweight (4kb compressed), focused only on images and comes with a bunch of settings.

It supports 5 different zoom types and can show image captions (long texts are handled well).

Nivo Zoom, by default, doesn't use overlays but can display the bigger image with an overlay where the opacity and colors of it can be customized.

Clearbox 3 is a Lightbox-like modal box script to display images, image galleries & various other contents including Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media formats, HTML, inner content, etc.

It can show multi-line text information for any content displayed. And, as a unique feature, images displayed can be rotated with a click.

Clearbox supports slideshow functionality and every aspect of it can be customized from the settings of the script.

It is friendly with Ajax & can display content via Ajax calls.

Also, its interface can be presented in any language by supplying a language file.

P.S. Clearbox is free for only personal use.

GMFoto is an open source photo gallery script, built with PHP & does not require a database.

With the template & multi-user support, the script offers a wide-usage from a single installation.

Images can be added by uploading via FTP or with KFM. They will be compressed and resized automatically.

GMFoto provides an unlimited category logic which can be created when uploading images as every folder is a category.

Images are displayed in a Lightbox and can be browsed easily with prev-next buttons.

Although the script is in early beta, it is a very promising one.

jQuery.popeye is a plugin which transforms an unordered list of images into a simple image gallery which enlarges the image clicked in Lightbox style.

The images are displayed in a box with prev-next controls & an info about the images can be mentioned.

The compact box has fixed, automatically calculated dimensions. The width and height are calculated so that all thumbnail images are cropped to the smallest width and height in the set and centered resulting image area.

The plugin can be easily customized with a list of settings provided.

Click here for the demo.

prettyGallery is a jQuery plugin for creating sliding image galleries on the fly.

Besides images, any content can be presented within the slider.

Images in the gallery are defined in an ordered list. Items per page, speed of the navigation & labels used can be configured.

The gallery uses prettyPhoto, a jQuery Lightbox clone,  for displaying the images in large-size.

This lightbox clone is very good-looking & can display:

• images
• present the images as an image gallery
• Flash

It works in all major browsers & animation speed, opacity and more settings can be updated.

LightWindow is a highly configurable Lightbox (modal window) solution built with Prototype & script.aculo.us.

It can display any media including Flash, Quicktime or an external website. And, it has gallery support with a multi-gallery feature.

The modal window can be custom positioned and it is automatically resized to fit the content.

LightWindow can be re-styled including markup, CSS & animations easily. Besides clicking on the close button & outside of the modal window, ESC key works for this feature too.

mooSlide is an easy to use & configure slider class for MooTools.

It is a functional solution to present any content, even as a Lightbox replacement.

Within 1 line of code, you can set the:

• slider div
• slide in speed
• fade out speed
• remove on click yes / no
• final opacity
• height of the slider container
• type of effect used
• toggler element
• slide from position

And, multiple sliders can be used in 1 page.

There are many Lightbox-type scripts which are built with different JavaScript frameworks and have different features.

planetOzh has created a nice comparison matrix for these Lightbox clones. You can sort the scripts and see their features easily.

Consider that the list does not include all the Lightbox scripts and may be missing the latest information but will definitely give you an idea and save your research time.

Growl is a lightweight JavaScript (mootools powered) that you can use for creating Lightbox-like but disappearing notifications.

Growl has 2 effects:

• Smoke (slowly fades out)
• Bezel (fades out and slides down)

Growl is very handy for events like "product added to basket, password sent.. and similar notifications.

Shadowbox is a cross-browser, cross-platform Lightbox-like media viewer which supports all the commonly used media types like images, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Flash, Flash video, and even external web pages.

Shadowbox can be used easily with the popular JavaScript frameworks as it already has adapters for jQuery, Prototype + Scriptaculous, Ext.js & Yahoo! User Interface Library.

Flash Video is supported via JW FLV Player. Although many types of video are supported, for compatibilty reasons, Shadowbox advises that Flash Video to be used.