How to Enlarge an Image in WordPress (Lightboxes!)

Whether you’re writing about technical topics or something even more visually demanding like art, sometimes you just want to make a picture bigger in WordPress. That can mean a number of things, from how it appears on the page to what happens when you click it. We’ll shortly cover the first case, and then spend most of our time introducing using a “lightbox” from the Simple Lightbox plugin to make our images appear over our content in a large size when clicked.

Quick Summary of Other Ways of Enlarging an Image

In WordPress, images are “auto-cropped” when uploaded. By that, I mean that when you upload a picture to WordPress that’s say, 2000 pixels by 1500 pixels, WordPress will also create several smaller “thumbnails.” Typical sizes for these are 150×150, 300×300, and 1024×1024. But different WordPress sites may have customized that configuration (at “Settings > Media” in the WordPress admin area). Other plugin and themes may also mean your WordPress site can have (a lot) more sizes beyond that as well.

Anyway, if you’re just looking at post and wishing that it had a bigger picture in it, you may find it as easy to “up-size” that image as selecting a different one of those sizes. That’s the first quick-tip for making an image bigger in WordPress”

• Change the image size you embed in a post. When you add an image to a post in WordPress, you’ll select a size. If you’re wanting the image to look big, give it its own line (like I did with the one below) and pick the “Large” or “Full Size” “Image size” for the image.

• Upload bigger images. If you can’t select a larger-enough image, let’s make sure we have a big file in WordPress. If you’re trying to show visitors a bigger image in WordPress than WordPress, you’ll fail. You must upload a bigger image to WordPress if the “Full Size” version isn’t big enough. “Full Size” is the WordPress label for the image size you uploaded, so some people who crop images before uploading their content to WordPress may find that to be the problem. Of you upload a little 300px by 300px image to WordPress, there’s no magic (yet devised) that will let you visitor see that big enough that it looks crisp on their large desktop monitor.

Video of Making an Image Bigger when Clicked

I cover the above tips a little in the video, as well as show off a great little “lightbox” plugin. But if you’re not in a video mood, feel free to just keep scroll to the text explaining how to show off bigger images with a WordPress lightbox plugin.