OK, gotta admit, this one's got me a little excited, probably because I've been playing with iPhone apps so much lately. On the iPhone (and some dashboard widget apps) there's a cool effect where you can "turn over" something you're looking at, which shows you what looks like the "other side" of it. A good example is looking at an image and then flipping it over to see picture info (date taken, etc). I've seen this effect used very well on a few web sites lately, too. Anyway, the jquery Flip! plugin:

http://lab.smashup.it/flip/

I've tested this in IE6 and it worked, FWIW. The author says it would, but I'm a bit paranoid (kicked enough times by that piece of merde). I'd like to see some more clear examples there of using the "content" option, which to me is what makes the use case something more than just a neat effect.

Anyway, this is kinda cool, IMO. Maybe "flip will be the next reflection", which was um, "the next rounded corners", which was um... the next Windows Playskool UI, no, wait, no... yes.

If you need to fade a set of images in and out of each other, all in the same box, this jQuery slide show animation plugin might do the trick for you:

http://www.gruppo4.com/~tobia/cross-slide.shtml

This can give you some of the nice fades and transitions that used to be found mostly in Flash-based solutions. The example there are nice, but you also can have a lot of control over how the animations look (think Ken Burns effect, with panning, zooming and fading all going on at once).

I fired this thing up in IE6 to see if it would pass muster and the examples worked. Kudo's to the author (Tobia Conforto) for that. This is a nice plugin to remember when you want to put in some nice self-contained image gallery animations.

If you're in the market for something for this, you might also want to take a look at the jQuery Cycle Plugin, which I've noticed is well supported in the jquery Google group (and I've used it for a few things, with success).