Animation and Effects with Macromedia Flash MX 1002004 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 10. Creating a Gallery

What you learn

How to navigate photographs

About loading content into a SWF

About the MovieClipLoader class

About loading thumbnails and full-sized images

How to create a progress bar

How to put the gallery online

Lesson Files

Start:

None

Finish:

10/complete/gallery.fla

10/complete/gallery.swf

10/complete/gallery_loader.fla

10/complete/gallery_loader.swf

10/complete/gallery_loade115

10/complete/images

An image gallery is a way to display a series of images, pictures, drawings or other graphics (such as an art portfolio) on your web site. Most galleries consist of a number of thumbnails, which are small photos, that provide a miniature preview for each image in the gallery. When the user clicks one of the thumbnails, a large version of that photo appears. Galleries are typically interactive applications, and when you create one it requires some forethought on how you want to navigate through series of photos, and display small and large versions of an image.

Galleries are common on the web, particularly with the growth of the digital camera industry and proliferation of people logging onto the web and wanting to share their photos. For example, you might want to display personal pictures of your wedding, a new baby, or your cats. Image galleries are important for some businesses too, such as photographers, artists, and models. You might even have a business owner with a shopping cart application on their web site, who wants to display a gallery of their products in conjunction with the cart application. Image galleries can be informal, personal applications (such as 50 images of your cat playing with a toy mouse), or dynamic, professional application displaying art from your latest modern exhibition.

There are many different ways to display digital photos: in a111 page, by way of email, in a Word document, and of courseFlash. You can use many kinds of animation, sound, and effects to display the images. There are examples of Flash galleries online, and you can find links to some of these examples at the end of this chapter.

Creating and maintaining a photo gallery does not have to be difficult, which is shown in this chapter's project. As long as you plan the project before you start, and organize your application logically, putting together the gallery and updating it with new photographs is easy.

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