Fireworks Article

Creating Flash-Based Slideshows with Fireworks

Using Fireworks Album Creator

Fireworks Album Creator gives you a one-panel method of gathering your digital photos, creating an album with specific properties, and generating the output viewable with Flash Player 8. Designers who prefer full control over such elements as stroke colors and component widths within the player itself, or who prefer to tear the thing apart and build it from scratch, can modify the source files contained in the sample download file and customize the slideshow beyond the abilities of a Flash component—as well as those we built into this extension ourselves. Use the source files as a foundation for building your own creative Flash slideshows.

Included in the output of the Fireworks Album Creator is an XML file which, essentially, controls the SWF output of the Fireworks Album player. This means no more messing around with table structures and HTML pages just to add an image to a new or existing gallery.

Starting Out

To use Fireworks Album Creator, first download the latest MXP file from the link in the Requirements section and install it using the Macromedia Extension Manager.

Open Fireworks 8 and select Commands > Create Slideshow > Create Slideshow. This opens the Create Slideshow dialog box (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Create Slideshow dialog box

The Albums tab is where you create a new album, open existing albums, delete albums, and choose a player type (see Figure 3). An album is the SWF file that you publish on your website—together with the exported images and XML file—to play the slideshow online.

Figure 3. Albums tab in the Create Slideshow dialog box

Click the New Album button to open the Files to Process dialog box (see Figure 4). Click the browse button ("...") or select Custom from the pop-up menu.

Figure 4. Files to Process dialog box

After you navigate to a folder and manually select the images you want to add, click OK in the Files to Process dialog box to add the selected images to your album. The album title that appears in the list is based on the name of the folder containing the images you just chose.

Click the New Album button again to add more albums to your slideshow.

Click inside the Title text box to change the title from the default name, "New slideshow."

Note: The Open Albums button works only when you have existing slideshows to open. The selected folder must be the root and contain the generated XML file in order to open an existing slideshow.

When you select an album title in the Albums panel, the Images panel displays a list of all the images within that album (see Figure 5). Select an image and click inside the Caption column to enter a caption.

Figure 5. Images panel

Press Enter (or just click away) to accept the change. Pressing Enter moves the highlight down to the next image's caption. (Currently there is a bug in Fireworks Album Creator 1.0 that does not show the preview.)

Rotate any images that are not in the correct orientation by selecting an image under the File Name column to view a thumbnail in the lower right corner. Click the rotation buttons next to the preview to change its position (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Rotating a selected image

The Albums tab also lets you add images to the new album, remove images from the album, or remove any of the albums you have created.

Click the Properties tab to apply some properties to the slideshow (see Figure 7):

• Apply properties to all albums
• Change the interval speed between the images displayed in the slideshow
• Use transitions between displayed images—either specific or random ones
• Modify the duration of the transition effect
• Allow users to click an image to invoke a new browser window of the image for saving locally

Figure 7. Properties to adjust for the slideshow

Click the Export tab (see Figure 8) to apply settings for outputting the slideshow:

• Select where to export the slideshow files
• Define the size of the image in the player (maximum size depends on the player)
• Choose to export just images, generate XML only, or do both
• Automatically enlarge images that are smaller than the previously defined area of the image size in the Width and Height text boxes
• Modify the image quality, whether for optimization purposes or to have no compression fragments
• Export only thumbnails
• Adjust thumbnail output size

Figure 8. Export settings for the slideshow

Finally, click the Create button to generate the album(s). Click Launch in Browser when the process is complete and observe the slideshow in your default browser.

Note: If you do not click Launch in Browser at this time, you can always navigate to the folder you selected for exporting the slideshow and open the index.html file in your browser to preview the player at work.

When all is finished, upload the files in the folder (HTML file, images folder, XML file, and SWF file) to your web server and preview the player once again to make sure everything is working as expected.

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