Have read through several of the threads in which folks were looking for a way to insert a photo gallery into Freeway. A couple of them went off topic into discussions of Photoshop versus Aperture versus Lightroom, but I still couldn’t find what I needed.
While ‘actions’ are cool, the few photo gallery actions I found seem clunky and, to be honest… ugly. Perhaps the problem is a limitation of what can be done within the ‘action’ framwork? What the hell do I know… I’m a designer…
Here’s what I’d like to be able to do and perhaps someone can point me in the right direction other than to a class on HTML/XML although I know some of you good folks live for that programming stuff.
I’d like to be able to draw a box on my website, the way you draw an HTML or Graphic box when designing a page. And then I’d like to be able to insert code the way you insert HTML markup stuff and then have the gallery automatically configure itself to fit within the boundaries of the box I defined (within reason) and still have the functionality of the particular flash gallery that I picked.
Now some of you are shaking your heads… I can see you in my mind thinking “can’t be done…, can’t be done… Freeway can’t do it…”
And while that may be true… that’s the way it should be able to be done (just in case any photo gallery scripters, who have forgotten the beauty of how easily things work on a Mac, may be reading this.)
Since I’m asking for the moon… here are a couple galleries I’d love to be able to just insert somehow into my Freeway page:
Remember folks… we’re Mac people (most of us… the rest are posers
But in seriousness… should I not be able to just insert a flash photo gallery as a flash object or something into a Freeway Pro 5 web page?
I’m not concerned about whether it’s free or not… I just need something that works, is at least a tad customizable and which doesn’t require a programmer’s skill to setup.
You can easily add the Flash component of this puzzle to your page,
just as you can any other Web-formatted content type. Freeway has
supported Flash since there was a Flash to support, and since
Shockwave was the big dog in that crate. Just drag it onto your page,
position it where you like, and you’re done.
The real issue here, the one that an Action writer will have all sorts
of trouble solving for you, is how intelligent that Flash component
is, and how it expects to be fed its photos. Flash provides all sorts
of different methods for reading in the configuration information it
needs to do anything, but that still comes down to a text file
somewhere with the contents of the folder full of thumbnails, the
folder full of files, etc. There are lots of good (security) reasons
why Flash doesn’t have any way to read a folder’s contents directly.
Walter
On May 11, 2009, at 12:10 PM, Ron Jaffe wrote:
But in seriousness… should I not be able to just insert a flash
photo gallery as a flash object or something into a Freeway Pro 5
web page?
Ok, so that would mean some kind of xml or programming code that would tell the flash component where to find the photos and what to do with them, right?
This one basic flash photo gallery I’m playing with has 4 components. An html file, a flash (swf) file, an xml file and a photo folder into which the pictures are placed.
Could I just copy those files (and folder) to the root of my site, drag the swf file to my website upload it and have things magically work?
Obviously the answer is that you don’t know because it depends upon what those files contain. Seems that would be the most logical way to have that work though.
Or do i still need some kind of action to make a flash version of a photo gallery to work?
gallery.swf is a Flash file, and you can drag it from the Finder into
your Freeway document as a shortcut to add it to your page. The long-
hand way to do it would be to draw an HTML box approximately the right
size for the finished Flash element, use File / Import to navigate to
the SWF file, Okay, resize to fit, position where you like.
The folder of files would need to be uploaded separately using an FTP
tool like Transmit, and probably the same with the XML file. You will
need to experiment with the exact location on your server where they
belong. Depending on how the Flash element was written, the file and
folder may need to go in your Resources folder, or alongside the page
where the gallery appears (call that page gallery.html just for
simplicity).
Walter
On May 11, 2009, at 12:38 PM, John-Paul Kernot wrote:
I’ve answered the rest of your question in reply to another person.
But to answer this specific question, no, all you need is Freeway and
an FTP application. Placing Flash on your page has been part of
Freeway since day 0.
Walter
On May 11, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Ron Jaffe wrote:
Or do i still need some kind of action to make a flash version of a
photo gallery to work?
After your advice and some experimentation, I realized this was a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be from other threads on the subject.
Essentially, I just dragged the SWF flash object from the photo gallery onto my webpage and copied over the XML file and [IMAGES] folder to the root of my site and that was it!
I just bought the gallery I wanted for about $20 and it’s done… fast and easy!
I am def a fan of http://www.flashnifties.com/
Look and feel you can change. Easy to set up, configure etc etc. and… quite easy to make it CMS since the client only needs to upload files in a folder on the server.
