Flash photo gallery

[acoleman]

Some people have mentioned wanting to have an easy-to-embed photo gallery for their pages, so I started working on something in flash.

I know that there are some pretty high-end solutions out there for reasonable prices (including the excellent Slide Show Pro, which may work well for people looking for a more robust solution), but I wanted to build something that would fit into both our templates and image box styles.

At any rate, I have a rough version going at
http://ucommxsrv1.unl.edu/nutube/index4.shtml
and would be interested collaborating with someone (or multiple people) to get it working a bit smoother before it gets distributed more widely.

Right now, it's a swf that displays and transitions photos and text from an XML file, so it can be edited externally pretty easily without re-exporting a flash file. Ideally, we'd build 3 or 4 sizes and then distribute the SWF files along with documentation to people who wanted to use it.

If anyone who knows Actionscript wants to take a crack at working on it, just let me know and I'll forward along the FLA file.

[smeranda]

Hey Aaron,

That looks great. I have also been working on this exact same idea, you can see what I have done at: http://admissions.unl.edu/ultimate.

A few things I would like to add:

1. A timer, so the slide show continues automatically (in addition to user controls). As part of this timer, an indicator/spinner (like espn.com)
2. I have a link tag in the XML, but haven't implemented that in the flash file.
3. I like your idea of the caption on hover. Two issues to work out: how does it function if the file is a hyperlink?, and what if the developer wants the captions to appear without hover? (For instance, the captions are necessary on my example, not optional).
4. The ability to display .swf in addition to image files. (should work as is, but not 100% sure)
5. A more appealing pre-loader.
6. Auto load next photo.

You can see my flash file at:

http://tweek.unl.edu/uploads/random_promo.fla

[acoleman]

I really like the look of your gallery Seth.

As we had talked about, perhaps an amalgamation of the two would offer the best solution. I downloaded your FLA file and started messing with it a bit. A couple things I think we could do:

1. Keep your "title" area and keep that being the clickable link for other information.
2. Add an "desc" area in the XML file and have that be an optional "on hover" that drops down a caption. Maybe it's a situation where if there is text in the "desc" field of the XML file, a small tab shows up under the title tab (which would need to go top-left if this were implemented) which would then drop down on rollover and show the other info.

I agree with you on all your other suggestions. From looking at your actionscript, it seems there's already some code in there for a slideshow function, it just needs to be fleshed out a bit. I'm going to tinker with things a bit.

Oh, and if anyone wants the FLA file for what I was working on, it's here:
http://ucommxsrv1.unl.edu/nutube/source/flashgallery210x280b.fla