How to centre align loaded images

programming flash
1

Hi Everyone,

I am very very new to flash and as my first project, I am building a swf that is supposed to load external images through the xml file into my own swf.

For simplicity, lets assume that I wanted to load an image into my swf file.

I create an empty movie clip (ctrl+f8) then drag it onto the stage and give it an instance name of parent_mc. Then press f9 to go to the actions panel and type the following -

_root.parent_mc.createEmptyMovieClip(“child_mc”, 99);
_root.parent_mc.child_mc._lockroot = true;
_root.parent_mc.loadMovie(“http://localhost/img/1_medium.jpg”, _root.parent_mc.child_mc);

_root.parent_mc._xscale = 50;
_root.parent_mc._yscale = 50;

The image shows up fine.

Now my issues -

  1. I want parent_mc to be 300 x 300. I couldnt get it to work by giving it _width & _height. So, I did a hit & trial with _xscale and _yscale that I still dont understand. Why can’t I give parent_mc a height and width?

  2. Now, all images that are big load fine, but if there is some image that is 200 x 200, I want it to be centred. How do I handle that?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Mandy