Creating your own custom flash slideshow is easy when you have a starting point. Real estate agents like these, they’re the greatest. Here it is. Download the flash slideshow template at the end of this post and start creating your own that you can incorporate into your web site and wow the world. In the download there are a couple components. But first, get your images ready and make them the same size in width and height. (no, they don’t have to be square, just all images the same dimensions)
For this my images are 300 x 300 pixels. You can use any size, any number – don’t worry about that now. After you have you images ready, put them in the ‘slideshow-images’ folder.
You’ve done the hard part already.
Now open the ‘slideshow.fla’ in Flash and select Modify and then select Document.
Here, all you need to do is set the dimension of your slideshow to match your images. I used 300 x 300 and then select a background color to match your site. Click ‘ok’ and your done with the flash, the template does the rest. Just Export it to a movie (swf) file, for the template I made it ‘final.swf’.
Customizing is done through the ‘slideshow.xml’ file. Open it in a text editor or even dreamweaver and play with the variables. Timer is how long the images appear before transitioning. Fadetime is the duration of the cross-dissolve transition itself.
If you want more or less images included, just add or subtract lines in the xml file to adjust and remember to add the images to the images folder.
When you’re ready, drop the .swf file, xml file and the image folder on your site and embed the .swf file wherever you want the slideshow presented.
It really isn’t that tedious.
- Download the template.
- Create your images.
- Select size and background color.
- Adjust variable.
- Add to site.
There are no links within this, it’s free of tricks and fun to use. Have fun.
Nice tutorial. Thanks for the template source, I look forward to having time to getting back by and trying it out…
I love this idea.
But my question is where do I find the slideshow.xml’ file? I got the slideshow.fla, but where do I generate the .xml file?
thanks.
brad
Hi Brad, nice to see you again.
I checked to be sure it’s in the download and it is.
I’m emailing it to you right now though in case you didn’t have it.
K
Hi, thanks for the slide template. But how if i want to put two different slides on the same page? I try to change the xml name from slideshow to photos and it didnt work. Please help. Thanks knox
Use Flash to edit the xml output file to a different name. Then in that new xml file point to a different image folder.
Hi. I love this too, but I’m getting a weird error. I can view the flash if I use a direct link:
http://(domain)/~ricks/images/final.swf
But when I embed it in a page, I get a big blank (the images aren’t cycling through. Any ideas?
You can see the embedded file at:
http://(domain)/~ricks/index.php
(Just replace (domain) with the domain from my email address).
Thanks,
Jill
Me again. Figured it out. Because the slideshow.xml file is called from the .swf file, I had to move the final.swf and slideshow.xml to the same directory as the page they are called from.
The images can go anywhere (so long as I adjust the .xml file accordingly), but the main embed call only worked if the final.swf and slideshow.xml files were in the same directory as the page that calls them.
Thanks – this is a great slideshow tool!
Best,
Jill
Jill – sorry i didn’t get back to you sooner, but you got it figured out, and it looks really good!
Everyone, you can you the absolute url’s in the xml file to avoid the frustration Kill went through.
Is there any way of adding a (different) link to each image??
Not with this package Andre – sorry.
The benefit with this though is that anyone can just replace the images in the directory and they change the slideshow.
Linking would have to be all in flash, this displays separate images withing it.
I am trying to load the slideshow through action script on to my flash website, the problem is taht I need the slideshow to display in the content area of my web page. I made the dimensions of the slideshow to fit my pictures and the area that I need them to show up in. Usually if I made the background the same size as the page I want the slideshow to load on I could tweek it so that it will play in the right area. But when I make the background of the slideshow equal to that of the page I want the slideshow to appear on the slideshow still pops up in the upper right. So basically my question is how can I make the slideshow appear in a designated area such as 308 x and 150 y
nevermind I figured it out it’s in the xml document duh…
I have been looking all over for something like this!!! I needed a quick fix and here it is! Thank you for taking the time to share it. It is super simple to modify with the external image file – adding and deleting images plus changing the order etc …. I love it!