Photos in Flash

October 31, 2003 | 5 Comments

I’ve got conflicting opinions about using Flash to present photography. I’ve seen many sites that do this well, Andy Budd’s site comes to mind, and many more that do not. All to many sites of this kind distract and put barriers up between the user and the content.

We come for the photos, not the Flash.

Egor Kloos has some very interesting thoughts on this issue.

If you’re thinking about using Flash to showcase your work, and there is no reason you shouldn’t consider it, give this a read and then give it some more thought.

If you do end up going with Flash as your delivery method, keep in mind the reasons you want to put the photos or artwork in the first place: to showcase your art, not show off your (or even worse your designer’s) Flash skills.

Filed under: Flash

Comments

1. patrick h. lauke said:

i’m currently in the process of talking to a photographer friend of mine who would like an online portfolio, and decided that the best approach may be to offer a dual solution: keep photographs as separate files, with meta-information in a database (title, date, category, etc), and offer a site interface in plain, standards-compliant xhtml, as well as a simple, slick flash interface (which loads the jpegs dynamically)…all held together by a PHP backend. best of both worlds, possibly. but i definitely agree that with the majority of photo sites i see, the flash designers seem to want to just go nuts and show off their l33t skillz, in many cases overshadowing the actual artwork of the photographers.

Posted on November 1, 2003 11:31 AM | #

2. Keith said:

That sounds like a great solution, one I’d like to see more of. When publishing essential content via Flash I think it’s almost always a good idea to provide an alternate version, for many reasons.

Posted on November 3, 2003 10:44 AM | #

3. Andy Budd said:

Hi Keith,

Glad you like my photo site. I decided to use Flash so that I could load in images in the background, thus reducing the perceived load time and creating a more fluid browsing experience.

Posted on November 22, 2003 02:31 AM | #

4. JC said:

Interesting. I used Flash for an artist’s site I did once because she was concerned about people stealing her images. They had two options – a file with a large watermark, or one with two much smaller animated watermarks sweeping across the page (so all the details could be seen at some point). That was enough to prevent anyone casually ripping her stuff off… no right click and save, and no screenshots… you’d have to take two screenshots on the animated one and combine them, and that’s more hassle than most people would want to deal with. :-)

Posted on May 20, 2004 09:49 AM | #

5. niall said:

andy any chance you coulds send me th .fla so i cou cutomise it for my own site.i wisshing to move over to a flash site for my own work.was looking at using a thing called simple viewer

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

ps i am very good with flash its self but not xml or php.

Posted on August 12, 2004 06:44 AM | #