It all started when I wanted to showcase my client portfolio on my web
site. I wanted to show off sites my company designed in a cool way. I wanted to
emulate the Cover Flow effect you see on an iPod. Not being a Flash designer
made it difficult. You can buy Flash scripts for under $100.00 to achieve this
effect, but you need a designer and a developer to make it work. Too much time
and money. I needed a simpler solution that I could implement myself. Then I
found Flash Gallery Factory.
This is an unusual tool that does two different things very
well. First, it can generate very cool galleries of photos with incredible 3D
navigation similar to the iPod Cover Flow. You can use these galleries for
site navigation by linking thumbnails to URLs. This means people can navigate
the gallery, click on a thumbnail, and land on a web page. The second thing
this tool does is create unique animated photo galleries with transitions
between photos, music and sound effects, more like the slide shows you see at
family functions. Depending upon what type of project you want to create, you choose
whether you want to make a gallery or slide show. Then you navigate to the
folder with your photos and import them.
If you are creating a gallery, you can pick one of the themes
included or customize your own. The themes included in Flash
Gallery Factory are amazing. See the picture above. Those thumbnails
spin around in a circle, and you control the speed and position with your
mouse. You can click on a thumbnail and it will increase in size. Click again
and it returns to its normal size. This is the effect I am using on my web
site to showcase web sites. It takes a while to load a gallery of high quality
photos, but I think the effect is quite good and worth the wait. You can
either add the code to a web page or to a pop-up the way I have. You can see
examples of both at Schneiderman
& Associates, LLC or at Ebook
Cover Artist.
You can also create photo slide shows. There is an extensive
gallery of pre-designed slide show templates and there is a collection of
sound effects and clipart included. The photo transitions are amazing and reminiscent
of the video transitions you find in high end video editing systems. I was
really quite surprised by the quality. Like the gallery option described
above, you import your photos, choose a template and then have at it, adding
special effects as you go along.
You can save your projects and return later to edit them
further. That's a good feature a lot of other tools in this category seem to
omit. You can save the Flash file as an SWF file. Flash
Gallery Factory will generate HTML so you can cut and paste into your
web pages. It's really easy to use. You can also create an EXE file that is
self-running which could be distributed on a CD. You can email that file if you like. You can also create a
screen saver. Flash Gallery Factory
is a handy little tool I think you will really enjoy using, whether for
business or pleasure. Click here to
download a free demo.
Flash Gallery Factory
