Display Full Images With Hover Zoom For Chrome

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 28, 2010
Updated • Sep 20, 2012
Google Chrome, Google Chrome extensions, Image
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Many websites and services on the Internet display image thumbnails on their pages which link to a larger version of the image on a mouse-click. Shopping sites like Amazon display small item images, that link to the item's product pages. All have in common that at least one click needs to be made to view a larger version of the image. On most websites, images are linked directly to their larger versions. On shopping sites like Amazon however, the smaller images usually lead to the product page, where the images need to be located and clicked again to view them in a larger version.

Hover Zoom for the Google Chrome web browser can display larger images directly on hover, on a lot of websites. The extension works fine on websites such as Amazon, Flickr, deviantart, Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Photos and eBay. A general rule of thumb is that it works on sites that link to a larger version of the image directly.

To use it, the Chrome user simply moves the mouse cursor over the image. A popup appears a moment later showing a larger version of that image on the same screen.

The initial delay before an image is shown in a popup, and other settings can be configured in the extension's options.

hover zoom options

Here it is for instance possible to configure a hotkey that needs to be used for the image to be displayed. Other options include configuring a second hotkey so that images are displayed using the whole screen space. By default, Hover Zoom resizes the image to fit the browser window.

Finally, it is possible to change the delay, remove the extension icon from the address bar, remove picture captions in the popup windows, add viewed pictures to the browser's history and configure sites where the extension should be disabled on.

Hover Zoom can be handy for Chrome users who often want to view the full sized images on sites that display them in thumbnail format.

Update: Hover Zoom has been pulled from the Chrome Web Store. We suggest you use Swift Preview as an alternative to view larger versions of images in the browser.

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Comments

  1. Maggie said on August 14, 2011 at 7:47 am
    Reply

    Is there a script that works this way that you can put on websites? So that users don’t have to have Chrome.

  2. surendar said on July 1, 2011 at 2:03 pm
    Reply

    hi

  3. Pijus said on April 14, 2011 at 4:10 pm
    Reply

    Is there the same function plugin for firefox ?

    1. Wally said on April 16, 2013 at 5:28 pm
      Reply

      Take a look at Thumbnail Zoom Plus. I’ve used it for several months and like it.

  4. Jason said on September 28, 2010 at 5:50 pm
    Reply

    I use this plugin and it rocks! Very useful for Chrome…
    Chrome rocks, although its installation sucks, why don’t they provide a simple setup file?

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