In our quest for the perfect photo sharing app, we came across Flash Album Creator from Dreamingsoft, Inc., an easy and efficient way to organise your photos and to create and share digital photo albums.
What’s different here is that in with Flash Album Creator, you can create slideshows. Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of the process to create a digital photo album using this software.
STEP 1. Getting It
Download and install Flash Album Creator from www.dreamingsoft.com. It’s a very small download-just 1.14 MB. Flash Album Creator works on Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP, and there are no special hardware requirements.
Add Photos To Your Project
STEP 2. Getting Started
Launch the application. When the window opens, click on the first button to the right of the Album Photo List to pop up a Select Photos dialog, which has a preview pane. Browse to the location where your photos are located, select as many photographs as you wish to include in the photo album, and click Open to add them.
Once added, click the last two buttons in the same line to set the order in which the photos will be displayed in the slide show. (The preview pane on the right makes this task easier.) Set the delay time to a suitable value. You may also enter descriptions or captions to each of the photographs for easy reference. Click Next.
STEP 3. Getting Set(tings)
You can now adjust the various image settings. There is an option to set the resolution of the frame size of the digital album. You can also opt to resize the photographs to the current frame size, or you can choose to crop the photo to the size of the frame. The JPEG quality option allows you to choose the quality of the final output. If you choose Best Quality, the size of your album will, of course, increase, so you need to experiment with this setting to choose what works best for you.
Customise The Various Settings For Your Photo Album
The ‘Hide Navigation Panel’, ‘Start Slide Show Automatically’ and ‘Endless Loop’ checkboxes are self-explanatory. Check the ‘Enable Fade Transition’ box to enable transitions between photos. The ‘Scale when the Flash window resizing’ box should be enabled so the photo album stretches to fill the screen if you maximise it or switch to full-screen mode. If you don’t choose this option, you can select a background colour that will appear behind the photographs.
STEP 4. Building It
Clicking on Build Album results in a Shockwave (SWF) file-this requires the Flash plug-in to be installed on your browser. Select the ‘Generate executable file’ box to create a standalone executable file, in addition to the Shockwave file. This executable will run on any computer-with or without Flash installed! Similarly, checking the box next to ‘Generate HTML page’ will create an HTML file. Enter a name for your album in the title field, which will appear as the title of this HTML file. You may also specify a background for the HTML, or assign a bitmap image as the background.
Your Photo Album Is Ready
After you click on Build Album, you can click on the Test Flash, Test HTML and Test EXE buttons to see if the album was created the way you want it to be.Depending on the output format you selected, to view the album, you can drag the SWF file to an Internet Explorer window to view it, or double-click on the HTML or EXE files to view the album. You can navigate through the album by clicking on the controls at the bottom. If you had opted to not use the Navigation Panel, you can click on the left third of the photo to go to the previous photo, and the right two-thirds to go to the next one.
To share your photographs, all you need to do is e-mail either the EXE file, or the HTML and SWF files together!
Flash Album Creator 1.59 is shareware-it works for 30 days in demo mode, with the limitation that the output file has a demo stamp. The full version costs $29.95 (Rs 1,350).
Creating photo albums has never been this easy, and there’s never been a better way to present them! Give it a try!