Dynamic vs Static

Hello all,
I'm rebuilding my website that I primarily use for sharing photos with friends and family. I've notice some of the really cool looking Dynamic Flash gallery templates out there. I like the way they interact to mouse clicks and fade photos in and out with different effects. I notice, however, that these sites can take a while to initially load but then they are very quick when moving from photo to photo.

My question is this, Do these types of websites load all of their content to the memory of the browsing computer before browsing begins? Or are photos and such downloaded as you brows?
My website will have several hundred photos on it and would take forever to load if it had to completely load on someones system before they could start using it.

Thanks

I may be wrong, but I think flash is one big file, so everything would have to load at once.

Yes I agree with Padraig. That's why you often see a preloader screen counting down or counting up. You may want to post this question to the pros in the flash forum.

I believe the idea with flash is to link to photos outside of the flash file, similarly this can be done with text files, animations etc.

This means your flash file will be something silly like 32kb, but it will link out to all the other information. So if you were to host your photos in a seperate directory and link to them you would be fine.

I had a similar project recently, making a 3 minute animation and a portfolio.

I had the portfolio as one file, and the animation as another. and linked the animation into the portfolio so if they didn't want to watch the animation the portfolio loaded really fast!

So yea, you can have a flash website that doens't take ages to load. Only load the vital bits, stuff like photos and text can be kept in files outside and loaded in quickly as and when they need to be. Even animations don't need to all be in one file.

REMEBER, when you use Flash as a portfolio to show your work you really should have a non-flash alternative. Some people don't like using Flash in their browser.

Mike

yes I think you can use an xml file to store the data, i.e urls of the images, then load it into flash. As 1840design says, the swf should be relativly small.

Have a look at this link

http://www.actionscript.org/resource...004/Page1.html