ARI Soft's Image Magnifer is an interesting plugin that let you show thumbnails of large images in your articles without using popups or liteboxes.

ARI Magifier is a Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 plugin that brings a nice magnification effect to your article images.

Just by mousing over the images you will see a magnifying glass effect that can be really useful if the source image is really large.

The plugin gives you the option to use a specific image as a thumbnail or better yet, just specify the source image and the plugin will create a highquality thumbnail of your original image automatically.

The plugin options are very basic, standard thumbnail width and/or height, thats it.  That is all you need.

And these two options can be overridden when you add the image to your article via inline parameters.

The parameters included are source image (mandatory), source thumbnail (if you don't want to use the automatic thumbnail option), thumbnail width and thumbnail height.

Just add a single line of plugin/mambot code, in its simlest form all you need to use is:

{arimagnify src="/images/stories/largeimage.jpg"}

...and that will display your large image in your article (sample pictures).

If you specify a thumbnail size (as an inline parameter or just using your preset plugin defaults) as 500pxls wide, and the large image is 1000pxls wide, you will have a magnification of 2x.  The larger the image and the smaller the thumbnail, the greater the magnification and effect.

This can be a very useful plugin depending of your website content.  A website about cars, clothes, fashion or girls (blushing...) could certainly use this function to get away from using popup images or liteboxes for greater details to their smaller thumbnails.

The plugin also work with VirtuMart and is crossbrowser friendly with Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7, Opera and Safari support.

You can buy this as a standalone plugin or (as we recommend) you can buy their ARI Smart Content component and get so much more for just a little more money.