How To Use jQuery Lightbox With A Database? Step by Step Guide!

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COMMENTS•8 Comments/in /Posted by MIKE DALISAY

Today I'm gonna show you how to use Lightbox while getting photo information from your database.

I think this is great if you wanna have something like a dynamic photo gallery in your site.

How To Use Lightbox With A Database
LIVE DEMO

Step 1: Prepare your Database. We’ll have something like this:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `photos` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `title` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  `description` text NOT NULL,
  `filename` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;
 
--
-- Dumping data for table `photos`
--
 
INSERT INTO `photos` (`id`, `title`, `description`, `filename`) VALUES
(1, 'Mt. Batulao', 'Mt. Batulao''s New Trail', 'Mt-Batulao.jpg'),
(2, 'Mt. Polis', 'A few klicks outside Bontoc going up to Mt Polis', 'Mt-Polis.jpg'),
(4, 'Chocolate Hills 1', 'The wonderful chocolate hills', 'chocolatehills-1.jpg');

Step 2: Download Lightbox here.

Step 3: Unzip it on your web directory.

Step 4: Prepare your database configuration file for database connection. Create config_open_db.php file and place the following code.

<?php
$host = "your host";
$db_name = "your database name";
$username = "your database username";
$password = "your database password";
 
$conn = new PDO("mysql:host=" . $host . ";dbname=" . $db_name, $username, $password);
?>

Step 5: Create a images folder, we’ll assume that your photos are stored here. You can download and use some photos for free from Unsplash.

Step 6: We’ll have the following codes on our index.php file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>How To Use jQuery Lightbox With A Database</title>
 
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="js/css/jquery.lightbox-0.5.css" media="screen" />
    </head>
<body>
 
<div>You may click the images below.</div>
<div id="gallery"> <!-- id to detect images for lightbox -->
 
<?php
include 'config_open_db.php'; // Database Connection
$sql = "select * from photos"; // Query the photos
$stmt = $conn->prepare( $sql );
$stmt->execute();
 
while($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)){ // Loop through the records
    $file_name = $row['filename'];
    $title = $row['title'];
    $description = $row['description'];
 
    // We will append the $file_name variable to href and src attributes
    // to identify what image is being selected/shown
    // The rel='lightbox[philippines]' <a> attribute is
    // needed to use lightbox for set of images
    // It should be stored under one name, we gave the name 'philippines'
    // we also included the title and decription on the title attribute
    // so it will be shown on the overlay
    echo "<a href='images/$file_name' rel='lightbox[philippines]' title='$title - $description'>";
        echo "<img src='images/$file_name' width='150' height='100' />";
    echo "</a> ";
}
?>
</div>
 
<div class='back-link'>
    <a href='https://www.codeofaninja.com/2010/10/how-to-use-lightbox-with-database.html'>Back to tutorial page</a>
</div>
 
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/js/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/js/jquery.lightbox-0.5.js"></script>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
// script to activate lightbox
$(function() {
    $('#gallery a').lightBox();
});
</script>
 
</body>
</html>

There are also lots of things that you can configure in jQuery Lightbox such as overlay background color, opacity, navigation behavior, button images, border size, resize speed, keyboard navigation, and etc.

You can find that in jquery.lightbox-0.5.js file in the js/ directory.

Download Source Code

You can download all the code used in this tutorial for only $9.99 $5.55!
[purchase_link id="12364" text="Download Now" style="button" color="green"]

Thank you for learning from our post about: How To Use jQuery Lightbox With A Database? Step by Step Guide!

Hi! I'm Mike Dalisay, the co-founder of codeofaninja.com, a site that helps you build web applications with PHP and JavaScript. Need support? Comment below or contact [email protected]

I'm also passionate about technology and enjoy sharing my experience and learnings online. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.