One of the most clear and effective way to display information is using image sliders or galleries. People’s attentions are automatically drawn by colorful images or moving objects. Also curiosity will drive your audiences to click the ‘Next’ button to see what is hiding.

Here I listed a few excellent usages and 13 simple yet stylish scripts to make it part of your websites.

• Shop promotion area

• Staff introduction with 3D gallery

• A step by step guide

• Movie website vertical slider:

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A few features are commonly required by designers and site owners :

• The ability to deal with photos in different size.
• Autoscroll as well as manual navigation
• Thumbnails: thumbnails should be part of the navigation system and indicate the current image displayed.
• Next /Previouse button
• Animation:easing options
• Can be easily stylized with CSS

The scripts I listed here are fairly simple to experiment, meet most maybe not all of the requirements above.

1: Accessible News Slider:

• Tested jQuery Version:v.1.2.6
• Tested Browsers:Windows: IE 6+, FF 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+ | Mac: Safari 3+, FF 2+, Opera 9+ (Thanks Matthijs!)
• License:Unrestricted.

Only one extra js file needed plus jquery core file simple enough to implement. Users who have turned off JavaScript or CSS will see a warning automatically.

Demo

2: Slider gallery

Three extra js files are needed

• jquery.dimensions.js
• ui.mouse.js
• ui.slider.js

Sounds complicated enough already? If you want a slider exactly like Apples plus a chance to learn some jquery. I believe this slider gallery will help. to see a demo.

3:JCarousel

Easily customizable. It is one of the most popular sideshow solutions.

An advanced example(the picture below) is used on this site. The programmer configured two carousels. One act as the external thumbnail navigation as the other’s.

More Examples are on the JCarousel official site

4: Slide viewer and slide viewer pro

Very well coded gallery with thumbnails generated by JavaScript. The code detects image width and length automatically.See live demo

5:Simple Controls Gallery

• Displays images either as an automatic or manual slideshow, with the image faded into view over the previous. A Navigational Panel slides up when the mouse rolls over the gallery to play, pause, or step through to a specific image within the gallery.
• In automatic mode, set the number of cycles before the script stops rotating. New in v1.3
• Each slide consists of an image that can be hyperlinked.
• Each slide can have a description associated with it. When defined, a Description Panel slides down from the top of the gallery showing the description. New in v1.3
• The gallery supports persistence of the last viewed image via session cookies, so going away then coming back to the gallery calls up the last viewed image within a browser session.

6:Galleriffic:

A jQuery plugin for rendering fast-performing photo galleries.The developers of this plugin indeed included almost all functions we need. Great Job!!!

Features

• Smart image preloading after the page is loaded
• Thumbnail navigation (with pagination)
• Support for bookmark-friendly URLs per-image
• Slideshow (with optional auto-updating url bookmarks)
• Events that allow for adding your own custom transition effects
• Support for image captions
• Flexible configuration
• Graceful degradation when javascript is not available
• Support for multiple galleries per page

7:Smooth gallery:

Features:

• Thumbnail
• Fading effects
• auto scroll

8: jquery.popeye: A Stylish and user friendly pop up gallery

Great for inserting multiple images into texts.

The image gallery plugin that started as an alternative to the famous JavaScript lightbox.

9: CSS left and right click gallery

Professional looking css gallery.

10:E2 Interactive Mootools Gallery

11:PiroBox: Another pop up solution

12:AJAX PHP gallery

minishowcase
minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX that allows you to easily show your images online, without complex databases or coding, allowing to have an up-and-running gallery in a few minutes.

13:Galleria: another stylish gallery shouldn’t be missed

s3Slider jQuery plugin