I noticed that a lot of people, like me, are using Flash 5 and in need of a photo gallery tutorial that works. I also noticed that most used the wonderful MX tutorial found here:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/photogallery.htm
But could not figure out how to make it work with Flash 5 even though they did in fact download the Flash 5 .FLA source file provided. Well, I was having the same problem and then I realized that there wasn’t a problem at all.
The viewer built into Flash 5 (the Flash 5 viewer) doesn’t support the same dynamic importing of images that MX does, so if you try to view your animation inside of Flash 5 after copying the tutorial files, you’ll probably get an error message stating that it can’t load yada yada yada.
However, that’s an issue with the Flash 5 viewer itself, because it doesn’t support it. If you export your files to your server or local computer and view it, it should work, because most of us have a higher version of the Flash 5 viewer installed on our computer - a version that does support dynamic importing like MX.
For those who don’t know the difference between the Flash 5 viewer and the Flash 5 software (hey, I’m not good at this Flash stuff either, I just started a few days ago), think of it this way. The software installed on your PC creates movies. It also comes with its own built in viewer to view movies. This viewer is version 5.
However, you also have a separate standalone viewer installed on your PC that’s a higher version than 5. How do you know?
Well, if you’ve gone to a website that says you have to install Flash to view the site, what it’s asking you to do is to install an updated version of the Flash viewer that your computer uses to view movies, not the Flash software that you use to create movies.
So, you probably clicked ok, installed the update, and by now, you never get that message anymore, because odds are, you have the latest version of the viewer installed on your PC. That’s also why you don’t have any trouble viewing the movies that are posted on this site even though they were created with higher versions of Flash.
Basically, you can write whatever code you want to in your Flash 5 software, because it’s the version of the viewer you have that determines how the code is read and therefore how it’s displayed, so if the built in viewer in Flash 5 can’t understand the code and ends up showing you errors, don’t panic. Just export the movie and all related files it to your server or your PC and view it all again.
If there was nothing wrong with the code other than the fact that Flash 5’s built in viewer is too outdated to understand it, you should be able to view it just fine in your actual browser. If you’re viewing it in your browser and it’s still not showing up, however, well, now you’ve got to check the code lol
But just try it out first. Use the .FLA file located in the tutorial I posted above, export it just as it is with all the related image files (make sure the names you give them match the names in the code and that you use the right path (directory) where the images are stored), and view it on your browser.
Let me know if it works for you!