Aleš Gabrovec

Get Lightbox to Read Images From a Directory

February 4 2009, 2:52am

I recently came accross a project where I wanted to have the ability to display all the images in a directory dynamically using Lightbox. With a few lines of php, I was able to generate the necessary HTML to get the Lightbox to show the images.

Here's the PHP fucntion:

function returnimages($dirname=".") {
    $pattern="(.jpg$)|(.png$)|(.jpeg$)|(.gif$)"; //possible filetypes
 $curimage=0;
  if($handle = opendir($dirname)) {
     while(false !== ($file = readdir($handle))){
          if(eregi($pattern, $file)){ 
              echo '<li><a href="'.$file.'"><img src="'.$file.'" alt="" width="120" height="80" /></a></li>';
             $curimage++;
          }
     }
 closedir($handle);
    }
}
returnimages();

The code simply looks in the directory and outputs specific HTML appropriate for lightbox.

View an example of the Lightbox gallery reading images from a directory. Have a look at the source code to see how it all works.

Download a ZIP containing everything you need.