How to Set Up A Flash Portfolio, Tutorial - Free Flash Template
Aug 17th, 2008 | By Adobe-Masters.com | Category: Flash, Tutorials | 7,284 views | Subscribe | PDFI found some cool free flashmo flash templates at the Crazy Leaf Design Blog that can showcase your portfolio on this link. I chose the Spiral Carousel XML template to work with for the purpose of creating a personal portfolio. I’m blogging the steps it takes to set it up. You’ll need Adobe Flash to follow along. Click the button below to see the outcome of this tutorial.
How to Set Up A Flash Portfolio
I wanted to customize this flash movie portfolio to display just a few of the sites I’ve created and manage. (One day I’ll come back and reveal some of my other sites.) After browsing the flashmo files, I came to the conclusion that the thumbnail_list.xml file should be edited in order to show images of my sites.
Website Thumbnail Capturing
The original template displays a movie flash of more than twenty (20) different sites in thumbnails. In order to change the thumbnails to display some of my sites, I used the blogginpro link to websnapr. Websnapr is a thumbnail tool that is very easy to use. I simply entered my site urls to create a 400 X 300 image. Just be sure you’ve typed .jpg after the file name when saving the image (example: latinaontravel.jpg) or it won’t save properly.
Resizing Thumbnails
I’ve already anticipated this moment days ago when discovered How to Auto-Resize Numerous Images - Batches In Photoshop. Setting up an auto resize action made the task of altering the 400X300 to a size of 140×105 very easy! Alternatively, you may resize your new thumbnails one by one.
Configuring Thumbnails
Okay, at this point we can head back over to the thumbnail_list.xml file to add the newly created thumbnails to the template. This file can be edited with any editing software. But of course, I’m editing with Adobe Dreamweaver.
For each site thumb, we’ll change the image filename, url, title, and description like so…
<thumbnail
filename=”latinaontravel.jpg”
url=”http://latinaontravel.com” target=”_self”
title=”Latina On Travel”
description=”LatinaOnTravel.com is a hot new Latina travel blog for travel, finance, and real estate. Join us on some of our weekend, summer, and winter vacation getaways. This blog is the perfect read for you if you’re a frequent traveler who loves a good time. Exchange links here, add a top travel site, or you may sponsor a travel review. We will help you to it! ” />
That was just a sample of the code used to upload this thumb. This template will hold unlimited thumbnails so repeat this code as much as you like to display your sites.
Flash File Edits and Template File Uploads
Open the .flv file with Adobe Flash if you wish to edit the text on the flash presentation. It was necessary to goto File > Publish before being able to see my changes. However, the publish automatically changes the HTML file causing the page to not be centered, so you may want to save the original HTML file and revert back after the publish.
Any idea on how to change the color in the flash?
Finally, after creating the site images and editing the thumbnail file, I had to upload the files to my server. Check out the product here.
Very nice flash templates. I downloaded the curvewall3D and edited the xml file for my images. It works fine. However, how do control the number of images in each row? I have 19 images and made sure there was a blank line after every 5 images, but they all still displayed on one line.
Also, your flash places the images randomly. Can that be adjusted to show images in a sequence like a story?
Thank you, jim
Hello there Jim, I’ve moved this over to the discussion forum. Hopefully we can work it out.
Please, can you tell me few more thinks about this, I am really fan of your blog…
Nice post, the outcome of the portfolio looks really good.