I was going to write a small post on a new free Flash based tool from Airtight Interactive called PostcardViewer. But once I got started I thought it’d be better to expand it to review a range of Flash based tools designed for exhibiting photography on the Internet.
Of course there are many more options than just Flash based ones. There’s nothing wrong with a good old html gallery, or a html one jazzed up a little by some JavaScript. The trouble with these however, is that there are not very many good gallery production tools for making html galleries. Many might disagree, and sure Photoshop can whip up a gallery in no time, but they are not the most attractive and customising them is not easy for the amateur.
I’m not a fan of the overuse of Flash that we saw through the nineties. It was a case of technology for technology’s sake, and designers went completely overboard. But the pendulum has swung back somewhat in the last few years, and I think photo galleries are examples of a good, restrained use of Flash in web design today. So, looking at Flash tools, here are a few of the more popular and most common.
A very popular tool, and a great place to start is PostcardViewer’s older brother SimpleViewer. It’s popular for a number of reasons. First up, it’s free! Secondly, there are a wide range of ways to use it, both for generating your own content and putting it up on a website, or looking at others’ content with it (Flickr for example allows sets to be viewed with Simpleviewer..) For absolute technophobes, it’s still going to a bit of a struggle to get it happening, but then again absolute technophobes would probably not be within a kilometer of the Internet. For anyone with just a little courage and the ability to follow instructions however, it’s a piece of cake. For an advanced internet user, it’s almost too easy and hard core coders will not even bother because they want the challenge of something at least as difficult as Pixelpost (which is actually not that difficult, especially for a coder!) And the punters have voted. Simpleviewer is almost ubiquitous on the internet. There are a lot of people using it, because it is simple enough that anyone that can follow instructions can get it to work with a minimum of fuss.
PostcardViewer is another simple idea from the same developer. Check out the demo. I love the idea, and for certain projects, it’d be perfect. On an technical level though, it didn’t impress me because of the end quality of the images. As you can see in the picture below, they have a jagged edge through them at full size. It may not bother a lot of people but people keen about their photography probably won’t like it.
(note the jagged lines around the signs)
Flash presentations seem to have a weakness there. I don’t know Flash well enough as to guess why, but many Flash presentations suffer from image distortion of some sort. It’s likely to do with resizing images and the way Flash handles that resizing. Not all Flash presentations suffer from that issue, but some certainly do and it’s an annoying detail.
Another high ranking option in Google is Imagevue. I don’t know how many people use it, but I have seen the site before, and its ranking would give it a lot of visitors. It all looks very well made, but its over the top techie look doesn’t appeal to me at all, and it costs $54US for a license. Maybe for some, but not me.
Looking on google for flash based image gallery, I realise this task is hopeless. There are squillions of flash based image gallery generators, from the simple to the hopelessly complicated. The trouble is there are SO many good options these days. And the really good thing is that usablity is improving. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of php based blogging options are simply too complicated for the vast majority of punters to get interested in. Only a very small percentage of users want to struggle with configuring anything in any sort of scripting environment. Even html is beyond the vast majority. To get good reach amongst the millions of amateur and professional bloggers / photographers, you need software that is EASY TO USE.
Or you need to pay for it. Foliolink is an example of a service where you get a whole website, which is essentially one big Flash based gallery. Lonna Tucker’s web site is a simply exquisite example of what you can get. But then again, it’s more her brilliant photography that is so dazzling, but the gallery is pretty cool as well. But the service is pricey – several hundred dollars a year. For a professional, this is of course peanuts, and it’d no doubt be tax deductable, and it looks like a great option if you are not interested in “rolling you own”.
For the slideshows on my parent website, I ended up having a go at a product a friend supplied. It’s called Slideshow Pro. It costs $25 for the basic version and $25 for an interface which is a bit dodgy really, because if you use the basic package, it’s all hand coding. It’s based on Ajax, and it makes cool slide show type galleries, but it’s got a lot of room for improvement. Still, I like the look of this one.
It’s an area where there is so much happening right now. I am the type not to want a purchased package and like to get my hands dirty. So in one way I’m very happy with a blog like pixelpost, which in itself is a very useful photo gallery. But if you want Flash based, and you have the cash, I haven’t seen anything better than Foliolink myself.
Beware, it’s a jungle out there…
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