Kowal_ProductGalleryHover – interactive product image gallery in Magento 2

Kowal_ProductGalleryHover is a module that adds a modern “hover gallery” feature to product lists (category view) in Magento 2 — providing a preview of additional product images at the category level. Users can view more images by hovering the cursor or swiping (on mobile devices) without needing to go to the product page.

Module Advantages

• Better User Experience (UX) – quick product preview from different angles increases engagement and conversion.
• Modern interactivity – support for scrolling images with a button, gesture, or mouse movement.
• Full mobile compatibility – swipe images on touch screens.
• No impact on performance – images are loaded asynchronously in the background (AJAX + IntersectionObserver), so they do not burden the page.
• SEO and Core Web Vitals optimization – main category images are rendered by Magento, with additional galleries loaded only after the page is fully loaded, maintaining a high PageSpeed Insights score.
• Built-in lazy-load mode – the gallery loads only for products visible on the user's screen.
• Ability to enable/disable the module from the admin panel (Stores → Configuration → Kowal → Product Gallery Hover).
• Automatic image scaling – images are proportionally scaled (according to sizes defined in view.xml) to minimize transfer.

How the Module Works

The module is designed with maximum efficiency in mind. It does not modify the Magento layout or DOM structure – it operates as a lightweight JS script that:

1. Listens to mouseenter / touchstart events for product elements.
2. On interaction, it retrieves the gallery of a given product via a lightweight AJAX request (JSON).
3. Displays additional images in a separate hover layer without reloading the page.
4. Images are scaled and cached server-side to reduce data weight.

Additionally, the module utilizes IntersectionObserver – a native lazy loading mechanism that automatically loads galleries for products visible in the viewport. This ensures users see ready galleries immediately without sacrificing performance.

SEO Benefits

The module is optimized to not negatively affect crawl budget, LCP, CLS, or TBT. All dynamic images are loaded after the main page content is loaded (initialized in before.body.end), making the module fully SEO and performance-safe.

• No impact on HTML source – search engine bots see the original page code.
• Does not generate additional requests on initial load – all images are fetched only when the user actually sees them.
• Maintains full compatibility with Magento caching (Full Page Cache, Varnish, Redis).

Why It's Worth It

Modern e-commerce stores should offer quick and intuitive access to product information. The Kowal_ProductGalleryHover module provides just that — an interactive preview with no delays, no performance loss, fully compatible with Magento 2 and SEO guidelines.