This could at least be an option that people could choose in their dashboard settings.

The good thing about it is that people can see each image without having to browse away from the page as it would appear superimposed over the small image.

As an example, Redbubble has this - you go to a page for anyone's image (I won't give one of mine as that could look like advertising, lol!), put your cursor on it and the cursor turns into a plus symbol so that you know that clicking on it will zoom in on the image. Click the image and a rather nice pop-up sort of thingy appears with the image in it. There's the usual little x in the top right corner to close it when done.

It's not an actual pop up - I presume it's javascript or somesuch coding doodah which only you folks would properly understand (I don't, as you can tell!) so it wouldn't have the usual annoyance value of a pop up and can be made to go away easily.

How about it?