How does XML work?

I’m making an XML photo gallery ie. the pictures get loaded from an XML file. The flash file works as expected. However, when I try and embed the flash file on a webpage, none of the pictures load. I have the swf file, the xml file, the images in a folder called images and the html file is outside of that folder. The html file links to images/file.swf and the swf file plays but none of the pictures load.