New Discourse Lightbox Enabled on Meta

We have enabled the experimental setting enable_experimental_lightbox on Meta. This is part of our ongoing efforts to improve your user experience and introduce new features.

The Discourse Lightbox is a new feature we’re testing that aims to enhance the way images are displayed on the forum. This change is also part of our migration away from the Magnific Popup, and therefore jQuery.

Recap

(For more details, please visit Discourse Lightbox - Migrating away from Magnific popup)

The new lightbox supports keyboard shortcuts for common actions such as:

  • M fullscreen mode
  • R rotate image
  • A open/close carousel
  • Z zoom in/out
  • D download image
  • T open image in new tab
  • / next image
  • / previous image
  • Esc close lightbox

And here are some of the reasons why we are moving away from Magnific Popup:

  1. It has jQuery as a dependency
  2. It contains code meant for ancient browsers
  3. The average device used to access the web has changed a lot since then
  4. It was designed with something other than single-page applications like Discourse as a priority - namely, static pages.

How you can help us

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature. If you’re an admin and would like to try it out on your forum, you can turn on the enable_experimental_lightbox setting. Please share your experiences, report any bugs, or provide any suggestions in this announcement topic. We will be collecting feedback until the end of September.

Our goal is to make this experimental feature the standard in October.

Thank you for your participation and for helping us make Discourse better!

29 Likes

Looks amazing, and those keybind are super helpful, great work! :tada:

5 Likes

I’ve been playing around with it for a bit now. I was expecting a swipe down/up gesture to close out of the image, bht it kept scrolling on the page, I had to long press to close it. Is this intentional or a missing feature?

9 Likes

Is there a topic somewhere with lots of quality images to see this in action?
If not is there a suitable category for me to upload some myself?

Maybe the images in Introducing image grids in posts fit your needs.

5 Likes

Is there a setting for the carousel?
It seems to be static.

Here are some (cc licensed) images folks can use to try out the lightbox within this topic.

3 Likes

That Pets of Discourse topic looks like it could use some canine reinforcements. :dog:

2 Likes

This has been disabled on meta. We’ll be making some improvements.

4 Likes

clearly the issue is not enough dog photos.

3 Likes

We can neither confirm nor deny this statement