Help with xml and picture gallery

Hey whats going on…ive just started messing with flash and made an attempt at creating a picture gallery…I stopped when i realized that i was probably approaching this wrong…I was just making it in flash with out xml…so it was very tedious cause i had to create each animation for each thumb and picture…here is the idea I was working on:

http://www.dimitritx.com/pictures.htm

SouthBeach is the only one that does anything currently…

Anyways, i was curious if anyone could give me some advice on how i could approach this, keeping a similiar design but having xml load the pictures…this way if i wanted to add more pictures or galleries i could just update an xml file instead of animating everything.

Thanks for your time.

ps…does anyone know of some solid books for xml and flash design?