Aleo Flash Gallery Slideshow Maker

[Lin Evans]

http://www.aleosoft....aker/index.html

This tool creates a Flash driven gallery and slideshow which can consist of stills or videos including Flash versions of your own PTE shows. You can mix stills and video and have a music background which can be switched on or off with a button control at the bottom right of the image. You can allow the slideshow to auto-advance or you can pause and use it as a manual slide advance. It's possible to click on an icon and have a full screen slideshow and press "ESC" to return to the normal mode.

I'm not a big fan of Flash galleries, but this one is very easy to use. I created a small test show with just still slides linked below. It takes a while to load because I added an MP3 background track. Before I added the MP3 the load size was about 400K and after it was about 11 meg. The actual MP3 additional size was about six meg so adding sound does slow things down. I'm sure that adding a Flash slideshow in the mix would also greatly slow down loading, but there is a counter which lets the user see what's happening.

I discovered later that only if the sound is made part of the SWF file does it really slow down the operation. I found a checkbox to make the sound external and not part of the SWF and now the SWF is back to about 400K, the site loads nearly instantly and the sound works fine.

Just something which may be useful to those creating websites. The code for the Gallery is generated very quickly and you can just FTP the files to a folder on your website without including the embedding code necessary for adding the Gallery as a link from a web page. If you simply create a folder on your server and upload the "images" folder and three files you will have a rather neat and extremely quick photo gallery which can also hold Flash SWF slideshows.

In addition, the program will convert from mp4 h.264, AVI, etc., automatically to Flash so you can just add an AVI or MP4 h.264 like a slide and it will automatically be converted to Flash FLV and added as a slide. You click on the slide icon and your slideshow plays. You have choices over the bitrate, framerate, etc.

It's not perfect, but it's one way to display your photography slides and slideshows created in PTE in a very easy to construct gallery. If you try it (30 day trial) I've found that you can get decent results with PTE shows, especially if they are not too complex. Make them reasonably small and they work well.

Here's a link to my sample:

http://www.lin-evans...test/slide.html

Lin