A New jQuery plugin: imgPreview allows your users to preview an image before clicking on it and, out of necessity, will preload the image so when a user does click through to it there is no waiting time.

The image preview shows up in a tooltip-like box appearing alongside the user’s cursor when hovering over a link. The plugin is entirely unobtrusive; it does not require any hooks to target specific links (no non-semantic classes); it will automatically detect the anchors that are linking to images and will only apply the preview effect to them.

Additionally, it allows for quite a high level of customisation with Callback functions as well. You can also specify a thumbnail prefix for images. So, it won’t take too long time to load larger images.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/new-jquery-plugin-imgpreview/
License: License Free