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About a month ago I was reading the New York Times online and they had an article which showed a road in Brooklyn that had been reconstructed to make it safer and more pleasing to the eye. To show the difference  in the reconstruction project, they showed a before and after picture using Flash that let the visitor drag a slider over the images, which were sandwiched with one on top of the other, so that you could easily see how dramatic the changes were. I immediately thought that this could be done in JavaScript using jQuery, so I set out to do it. Here’s the result:

Pretty slick no? The possibilities for this plugin are endless. Doctors can have before and after images of patients, Photoshop users can show the before and after differences between images, remodelers can show the before and after images of projects and on and on. This plugin weighs in at only 7K and can be used multiple times on a page.

Download

Go to the Before/After download page

What’s So Great About this Plugin?

• Slick effect, no Flash needed
• It’s just 7K (4K compressed)
• Reusable on multiple containers
• Degradable. If the visitor doesn’t have JavaScript they will still see both images.

How to Use

First, your before and after images must be the same size.  Each image must be inside its own div, and both of those within a containing div which must have an ID.  See this example.

<div id="container">
 <div><img alt="before" src="before.jpg" width="600" height="366" /></div>
 <div><img alt="after" src="after.jpg" width="600" height="366" /></div>
</div>

All images *MUST* have the width and height declared otherwise the plugin won’t work in Safari, Chrome, and any other webkit-based browsers.

To use the plugin you’ll need to have a copy of  jQuery and the jQuery UI, or point to jquery on Google andjqueryui on Google, and the plugin. Place the files on your site and link to them:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.1/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.beforeafter.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
	$('#container').beforeAfter();
});
</script>

That’s it! You can apply the before/after plugin to any number of elements on a page.

Options

The following options are configurable:

• animateIntro  – whether or not to have the drag bar start completely to the right of the container and gradually move by itself to the midpoint (default  false)
• introDelay – if animateIntro is true, the number of milliseconds to wait before beginning the automatic drag bar move to the center of the image (default  1000)
• introDuration – if animateIntro is true, the number of milliseconds it will take for the drag bar to go from the right side of the image to the middle of the image (default 1000)
• showFullLinks – whether or not to display links below the image that a visitor can click on that will automatically show the full before or full after image (default true)
• imagePath – the path (absolute or relative) to where you store the navigation images (default ‘/js/beforeAfter/’)

Options are added when calling the script:

$('#container').beforeAfter({
	animateIntro : true,
        introDelay : 2000,
        introDuration : 500,
        showFullLinks : false
});

Enjoy!

Demos

• Example 1
• Example 2

Note that the plugin uses several images which are kept in the same folder as the plugin. If you store the plugin in another folder on your server, update the path to these images. Please be sure to read the license before using.