building a slideshow with flash

The first step in building our slide show will be to import the images into the Flash program.

If you haven't done so already, start a new Flash project, and select ActionScript 3.0 from the Welcome window. Next save your project in a folder you can easily find.

You can download the four sample photos by right-clicking (Control-click on Mac) on the links below and saving the images to the folder where you will be working from:

Right-click here to download the sample image of some boats
Right-click here to download the sample image of a waterfall
Right-click here to download the sample image of a town
Right-click here to download the sample image of a palm tree

OR you can right-click (Control-Click on Mac) on the sample images themselves, and save them to the folder where you will be working from:

To import these images into Flash, go to the File menu and select Import --> Import to Stage.

The Import to Stage option will also place the photos in your Library. The only difference between "Import to Stage" and "Import to Libarary" is that one will also place the photos directly on your Stage.

Next, hold down the shift key and select all four of the photos so you can import them at the same time.

Click import. After importing, it is really important to not click on the images on the Stage. You will only see one image, that is because they are stacked perfectly on top of each other. (Your top image may be different than the example)

All four images will have a border around them (colors may vary depending on the Flash version you are using) to indicate they are selected.

The next step is to align them property with the Stage. We want to make sure to get it exact, so we will use a special align option built into Flash. Click on the Window menu and select Align.

The align window will appear on the right side. There are several options for aligning elements on your Stage using this window. The aligning options allow you to either align elements with each other, or in relation to the Stage. We will align these images with the Stage, so you should turn on the To Stage button at the right (see the cursor in the image). It will darken to indicate it is selected.

Next, you will want to align your images to the vertical center and horizontal center. The buttons to do this are in the middle of each of the align segments (circled in red). If some of your images did not align properly, it may have been because one of the images was accidentally de-selected. To fix this, click Ctrl-A (Command-A for Mac) to select all of the images on your Stage and press the proper align buttons again.

Once your images are property aligned to the Stage, and no white is showing, you can proceed to the next step.

Click on the Modify menu and select Timeline --> Distribute to Layers.

This will put each image on its own layer, as well as automatically name each layer based on the image name.

Whenever you do a "Distribute To Layers," it will take every element currently selected on the Stage, and place it in a separate layer. If everything on the Stage is selected, then it will leave the existing layer empty. We can delete this top Layer1 since it is empty and we will not be using it. To delete it, select Layer 1 and click the trash can icon at the bottom of the timeline.