Free Flash Gallery

dartsfan

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a free Flash gallery that can be easily embedded in a HTML page's contents?

I am currently developing a site for a cabinet-maker and am looking to employ a Flash gallery to showcase some sample cabinets.

The ideal gallery should contain thumbnails functionality and the ability to change the background colour.

I've had a good look around and the ones I've come across are mainly proprietary or require PHP etc. So if someone could point me in the direction of a recommended gallery it would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Eoin

Simpleviewer isn't bad. You just need to be able to generate an XML file.

sample here: http://simpleviewer.net/simpleviewer/examples/lores/

whizgremlin

Hi Dartsfan,

I know you request flash, but I would really recommend checking out dynamicdrive.com

Link: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/indexb.html

The above link contains script galleries, basically these are copy n paste codes and just update ur html and upload the .js file if required and ur ready to go, I would definitely recommend the lightbox gallery, you have the option for thumbnail and if ur in any way a coder you can pretty much change a lot of things here such as the background as you've mentioned... from a webdesigners point of view, having a flash gallery may look pretty but it can be bulky and not that SEO friendly plus not everyone has high end computers and it can be annoying to load for some... just a thought, but you should check out the link, a brilliant and easy alternative...

Liam Byrne

whizgremlin wrote: »

Hi Dartsfan,

I know you request flash, but I would really recommend checking out dynamicdrive.com

:
:

......having a flash gallery may look pretty but it can be bulky and not that SEO friendly

+10,000

If you develop the site in Flash, then there's very little chance of a search for "cabinet makers in xxxxxx" showing up his site.

whizgremlin

Liam Byrne wrote: »

+10,000

If you develop the site in Flash, then there's very little chance of a search for "cabinet makers in xxxxxx" showing up his site.

yep, ive never been a fan of flash, i prefer animation from scratch if im going to consider having anything moving on a website! :pac:

Eoin

I thought we were talking about a flash gallery in a website not an actual flash website.

whizgremlin

eoin wrote: »

I thought we were talking about a flash gallery in a website not an actual flash website.

yeah thats what the OP has said, I just agreed with the above comment...if it is going to be a flash gallery and displaying these cabinets then they would wanna be able to find them on google also, using flash is going to cause a bit of problems with their SEO, we were merely stating the impact flash has on a site if created entirely with flash nevermind what the impact the gallery will have on his html site...:)

Eoin

Nothing insurmountable though, I'm sure you could use CSS with a bulleted list of images to have something that's more SEO friendly. Of course, there's probably no need for all that with all the cool JS plugins you can get these days.

Liam Byrne

eoin wrote: »

Nothing insurmountable though, I'm sure you could use CSS with a bulleted list of images to have something that's more SEO friendly.

In which case Google directs visitors to the "HTML version", so what's the point in having the Flash version ?

OP - in order to have the site rank anywhere, all of the images in the site will need to have proper title tags indicating what they are, and have semantic markup (page headers as h1's, product titles as h2's etc)

e.g. a page with a title of "Kitchen Cabinets" will (roughly speaking) count as a single mention of the phrase, but why not have a proper site whereby the images and their titles all have text that includes that phrase, e.g.

"18" kitchen floor cabinet"
"18" kitchen wall cabinet"
"18" kitchen wall cabinet with glass doors"
etc, etc

That way, a page with 25 different "kitchen cabinets" could legitimately have 52 mentions of the phrase: the page title, the header on the page plus 25 x (image title + text of product title).

Doesn't take a genius to work out that - whatever about Google's weighting of page elements - 52 mentions is going to work better than 1 or 2.

eoin wrote: »

Of course, there's probably no need for all that with all the cool JS plugins you can get these days.

100% agreed.

whizgremlin

eoin wrote: »

Nothing insurmountable though, I'm sure you could use CSS with a bulleted list of images to have something that's more SEO friendly. Of course, there's probably no need for all that with all the cool JS plugins you can get these days.

Yeah of course, I just dont see the logic in putting barriers in your way just because something looks good or sparkles a bit brighter than something else... there are so many options out there like the Javascripts and they have never let me down and most are crossbrowser friendly so i fail to see a downside, but the reason I threw the JS and SEO comments into the mix is because sometimes people dont realise the impact flash can have, so hopefully we might have helped in some small way...:)

dartsfan

Thanks for the replies, I wasn't aware of these JS alternatives so I'll have a look at these now to see what they offer.

whizgremlin

dartsfan wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, I wasn't aware of these JS alternatives so I'll have a look at these now to see what they offer.

No problem dartsfan, I definitely recommend Lightbox, its so easy to use and to configure!

Goodluck with your project...:)

Eoin

Liam Byrne wrote: »

In which case Google directs visitors to the "HTML version", so what's the point in having the Flash version ?

No, you would just hide the list with CSS and have it on the same page as the flash gallery. Might be considered SEO spam though.

dartsfan

What do you make of this solution:

http://host.sonspring.com/hoverbox/

Seems quite neat to me, how would it fare for SEO compared to the Lightbox?

Eoin

Fine - if you view the source of the page, you can see it's an unordered list (<ul>) with normal image tags, so you can add alt and title tags for each one.

whizgremlin

dartsfan wrote: »

What do you make of this solution:

http://host.sonspring.com/hoverbox/

Seems quite neat to me, how would it fare for SEO compared to the Lightbox?

not bad dartsfan, you would just need to make the actual hover images a bit bigger than what they have specified, but yeah looks like ur onto a winner there!

dartsfan

Will go with the hoverbox so. This link contains a lot of good suggestions too:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/18/30-best-solutions-for-image-galleries-slideshows-lightboxes/

Thanks for the suggestions.

whizgremlin

dartsfan wrote: »

Will go with the hoverbox so. This link contains a lot of good suggestions too:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/18/30-best-solutions-for-image-galleries-slideshows-lightboxes/

Thanks for the suggestions.

looks like lots of fun dartsfan, best of luck with your gallery! :cool: