As I have quite a few images in my blogs, and as I use thumbnails to reduce bandwidth requirements I usually use Ecto's built in functionality to let a user click on the thumbnail to bring up a page with a higher-resolution version of the image. But there are a number of javascript tools out there to do this in a much fancier/nicer way. FancyZoom is one of them :

Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages

This much-requested chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, originally written for this blog but later rolled out to the Panic website and used for screenshots, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website!

Designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load, FancyZoom's raison d’être (French for "raisin-determination") is providing a smooth, clean, truly Mac-like effect, almost like it's a function of Safari itself. Since I originally wrote this script, there are now a lot of image zoomers to choose from (including a similar effect now on Apple's own site!), such as the popular (and inspiring) Lightbox. So you might be asking: "Cabel, why use FancyZoom?" Well, here's why!

Focused on the smoothest, most polished zooming animation possible
Automatically scales images from any image link, with no HTML changes
Preloads full-size images in the background on link mouseover
No resource-heavy Javascript libraries — 100% coded from scratch to zoom
Draws a nice drop shadow under the full-size image to offset it from the page
Uses Safari 3's "box-shadow" feature to draw the drop shadow natively, no images required
Requires only two new lines of code in your HTML
Tested and works with Safari, Firefox, IE7, and IE6. (Looks better in modern browsers.)

[From cabel.name: FancyZoom 1.0]

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