How to Make a Flash Photo Album
Photographers want to display their work in an attractive format to showcase the images and boost sales. One of the most appealing formats on the Web is the Flash photo album. These albums are collections of images that are displayed on a Web page and can be perused by visitors to the site. Many Web hosts offer Flash album creation modules, or photographers can design and create a gallery manually, then upload it to their website. Creating an album or gallery is as simple as downloading one of the many free gallery viewers, modifying it to achieve the desired look and adding images.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Download a free gallery viewer such as SimpleViewer or Entheos Flash Galleries. There are two modifiable files in each of these applications: HTML files, and XML files. Each of these files can be customized to suit the user. There are also folders to hold images and thumbnails for the pictures you want to display. The gallery viewer will also include an SWF file, but this file cannot be modified unless you have purchased and downloaded Adobe Flash.
-
2
Create a new folder on your desktop called, for example, “PhotoAlbum.” Then create two new folders inside the PhotoAlbum folder called “Images” and “Thumbs.”
-
-
3
Copy your images to the Images folder. They should be JPEG files and should each be no more than 2 megabytes in size. Copy the image files to the Thumbs folder as well. Make them into thumbnail images by resizing them with a photo editor such as Adobe Photoshop or Serif PhotoPlus, or with a photo resizer such as PIXresizer or FastStone Photo Resizer. The thumbnails should be at least 75 pixels on the shortest side.
-
4
Open the gallery XML file in a text editor such as Notepad or WordPad. Modify the tags to show the colors, positions and columns that will create the desired layout for the gallery itself. For example, to create a black frame around each image, type “FrameColor=“000000”” or for white text, type “TextColor=“FFFFFF.”” The tags for FrameWidth, ThumbPosition, ThumbColumns and other tags are all editable. Use a search engine to find a list of hexadecimal (hex) color numbers on the Web.
-
5
Type the following code for each image that you want displayed: “<image imageURL=”images/001.jpg” thumbURL=”thumbs/001_th.jpg” ><caption>enter a caption here</caption></image>.”
Each image must have its own tag with an image URL and a thumb URL. You can insert captions for each image or not. Save the gallery XML file in your PhotoAlbum folder.
-
6
Open the index HTML file in your text editor. Personalize the background color by editing the “params.bgcolor =” tag. Use any of the hex colors found in your previous search. Save the file.
-
7
Upload your PhotoAlbum folder with all your files to your Web host’s server.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
Experiment with frame widths, frame colors, thumbnail position and other settings before you upload all the files.
Organize your photos in the order you want them to appear. Using a number as the first part of the file name is a quick way to do that.
Be sure your thumbnail pictures are in the same order as the image files.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Sunflower image by Istvan Ferge from Fotolia.com
