Juggling levels and creating a simple "photo gallery" in Flash

programming flash
1

Howdy folks! I just got done reading and experimenting with Kirupa’s tutorial on loading movies:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash5/loadmovie.htm

Very cool and fairly straightforward stuff, but I have an issue that the tut didn’t seem to address. Specifically I am working on a Flash presentation where there will be a image which changes depending on a variety of buttons you can press below it. Basically it is a photo gallery of sorts and clicking on the thumbnail buttons is supposed to load up the larger images (all in the same place, each one over the last). Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

I understand the whole concept of loading movies (in this case making each of the larger images it’s own .swf movies to load i when the corresponding button is pressed) - but my question is this - how do i specify exactly where the image will appear (eg. x and y coordinates?) and also, in terms of using levels, is there a way to put all the loading movies on the same level, but not have the image that is being replaced by a newly loading image disappear before the new movie is loaded?

Does that make any sense? Hopefully I am not rambling too badly here. I’ve had a lot of tea this morning. :bounce:

Many thanks in advance if anyone can help me out with this, or point me to a tutorial that deals with these issues specifically!

Zeep zeep

2

You do not have to load each JPG in its own SWF! If you check, Flash MX > Photo Gallery scroll to the bottom you can down the example of creating a photogallery in Flash 5.

I’m currently testing this out, I have an xml file with the urls of my photos. Then I load that XML into a simple array. Then I can cycle though the array easily viewing photos, straight from the server.
And it works great, I have to work on the layout though. But you do not have to load jpgs in SWF files to load them from the server.

3

Many thanks imvain2! I’ll check out that tutorial and see what I can do - good to know I don’t have to convert all the .jpgs to .swf… Your XML project sounds impressive!

4

If I can figure it out, then its not that difficult. I’m new to Flash. I program in ASP/Visual Basic/Vbscript, Cold Fusion and various other minor languages. So action script makes a little sense to me, but I just have to get used to using addressing the different layers, and scenes and frames, that is the hardest thing for me so far. I try to stay away from the Flash Animations(Tweening) and what nots until I understand more of the action script.(I know I know that is backwards)