I stumbled across a nifty little bit of freeware, called SimpleViewer, that helps to generate rather interesting Flash photo albums for Picasa/Flickr/ iPhoto/ etc... users. The directions to set up a basic (generic) photo album are easy to follow.

I modified the end product by adding my template's top and bottom banner into the index file that it automatically generates before I uploaded the files to the server. This just gives the album more of a tailored look and does not force the viewer to navigate back to the linked page, but it is completely not necessary if you just want to quickly generate albums. I also tweaked the javascript so that the top of the album would not take up too much space. Basically I left the horizontal width at 100% and changed the vertical height to 70%. The resulting javascript code looks like:

var fo = new SWFObject("viewer.swf", "viewer", "100%", "70%", "7", "#181818"); fo.addVariable("preloaderColor", "0xffffff"); fo.addVariable("xmlDataPath", "gallery.xml"); fo.write("flashcontent");

This program will probably be more pedagogically useful to colleagues in the Humanities than in the Social Sciences, but you never know... I guess it could be used to help students visualize life in different areas or for photos of leading figures.

Overall, I have to say that the end product generated by this template looks much better than the automatic Flash photo albums generated by Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks. The template is even sharper than the standard templates that come with Picasa. My first album is just composed of a few photos I took at the Sackler-Freer Gallery on the HWS Learning Communities trip to Washington, D.C. this fall.

Labels: web technology