impt simple dev issue ---- image gallery using flash on mac

funkster

I am newby developer with limited experience around web dev on pc but I am now on a contract putting together an image archive on a mac using a flash front end, but in terms of the back end I am lost. I can use VB and MS Access to control 5000 records easily for server side scripting generally but is that possible on mac or even wise or should I use PHP and MySQL. If you cant help directly can you sign post me to useful sites.





peace & luv y'all

nebagakid

i know I remember seeing a flash template for a slideshow some where (on one of those web designer blogs)... now if I can only remember where . but here is one:



http://www.macromedia.com/support/fl...slideshow_xml/



good luck

johnq

What are you doing exactly. Are you having Flash open the images within Flash so you can scale/etc them?



Last I did this (a year ago) Flash MX only allowed loading jpeg files via ActionScript (even though it can handle GIF, PNG and other formats via the authoring interface).



You'd be better off having the images be shown via html pages (if you need to scale them down use the GD libraries in conjunction with PHP). The database could then merely handle the image pathnames. Flash could merely be the control interface.



But if all you need is jpeg support and if you need to move and animate the images somehow, then ok, do it all in Flash.



I certainly wouldn't bother actually storing the actual images in the database (as people often do) short of using Oracle (which you aren't! )

xool

Flash can be used to load gallery information and the photos for display. In a dozen or so sites this is what I've done. The image scaling and thumbnails are all generated by PHP and the flash merely loads them in.



Why flash? For large photo galleries with many sub categories and many photos, the pure-flash gallery eliminates needless page reloads.



Click a thumbnail? The grid of thumbnails fades out and the full size photo fades in. Click next, and the photo fades to the next one. A standard HTML based gallery would require constant page loads.



That said, I'd say develop it all in PHP first. Once that works, its easy to use flash to display the photos.

xool

One other advantage is that flash adds a small layer of security to the photos. Yes, someone will always be able to download or screencap them, but by routing it through flash it becomes a wee bit harder for your average user to steal the pictos. They can't just right click and do a save as anymore.