Animate Panning Slideshow with jQuery

 Highly visual websites rely on the ability to showcase imagery automatically. Whether it be a professional photographer or zoo, slideshows pop up so frequently because they work well.
In today’s tutorial we’ll take the makings of a classic slideshow, but use a different kind of transition to animate between slides. It may not fit every project, but diversity is always welcome in the world of web design.

As you may notice, we’re loading a few external JavaScript files into this page. After loading in the latest version of jQuery, we bring in the two plugins mentioned above. I’ve put both into a subfolder to keep things organized. The last JavaScript file loaded is “image-rotator.js”, and is where all of our custom jQuery code will go in a few steps.

Keeping with convention, we’ll contain the slideshow inside of an unordered list. This type of slideshow will require a helper “window” div in order to work correctly. Since we’re essentially looking at a specific corner of a larger image (simulated by the list) we will need to mask the areas outside of focus. This may sound a little complicated, but the image below should help you visualize: