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Fireworks Article

 

Creating Flash-Based Slideshows with Fireworks


Alan Musselman

Alan Musselman

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Using Fireworks Album Creator
  3. Customizing Album Player Files
Created:
14 April 2006
User Level:
All

Photo slideshows are all over the web. Flickr, Kodak EasyShare, PhotoSite, Pixagogo, and others make it easy for you to upload photos and share them with others. But they don't allow for much customization.

In prior versions of Macromedia Flash, building a custom Flash-based slideshow was a time-consuming task, depending on the complexity of your slideshow. In addition, the existing Modern Photo Slideshow template that comes with Flash was too basic for my tastes. Even though Flash developers have created some very clever slideshow components—like SlideshowPro which is extremely powerful for the majority of users—I felt restricted whenever I used a Flash slideshow component.

Maybe it's just me, but I was looking for something a little more robust and expandable instead of modifying an XML output with hundreds of properties.

One day before the release of Macromedia Studio 8, Hiroshi Miyazawa and I were eating lunch and discussing various concepts to enhance Fireworks 8 using the Fireworks API and Flash 8. One idea that we had involved building an extension so that designers and developers could easily modify the album player source FLAs and further enhance the player's ability to display images.

The end result is Fireworks Album Creator (ver. 1.0), which allows you to create a Flash slideshow without knowing how to use Flash. You simply select a folder with images, add slideshow options (such as slide transitions), select a Fireworks album player (a Flash template) for the final output, and automatically batch-process the required thumbnail and full-size images that are optimized for the web (see Figure 1).

Fireworks Album Creator workflow

Figure 1. Fireworks Album Creator workflow

That's all it takes to create a Flash-enabled slideshow in Fireworks 8. In addition, you can create multiple albums and add captions within an album player.

This article describes how the Fireworks Album Creator works and how you can extend it so that it outputs the kind of online photo album you'll be proud to place on your website.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial, install the following software and files:

Fireworks 8

Flash Player 8

Fireworks Album Creator 1.0

Sample files (for customizing the player):

Prerequisite Knowledge

A general knowledge of Fireworks is all you need to use the Fireworks Album Creator. If you want to modify the album player's source FLA files, you should at least have a general understanding of Flash and ActionScript 2.0.

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About the author

Alan currently plans to excavate an ancient Mayan ruin in the Yucatan Peninsula while streaming the progress with Flash® Media Server. When he's not snowboarding in Tahoe, he's hiking around California and exploring San Francisco.