Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Flash and Reviews.

When I am designing a web site or a web presentation, I always look for a nice way to show photos. No matter how many time you may spend on the design, nowadays if you don’t show your pictures in an effective way, your work will look cheap.

The hand that will help you a lot to manage this problem is photoFlow, a Flash component that will display multiple images in a vrey interesting way. The guys at Flashloaded know they have released a nice component, so they want me to review their work through this ReviewMe post.

First of all let’s see how does it look:

All your photos will be stacked in perspective behind the active photo, and the user can browse them clicking on a photo, acting on the slider or watch them cycle as in a slideshow.

Change images through an external XML file

There are three ways to change photos in the slideshow, but the most interesting is the capability of changing the photo directly through an external XML file. This means you don’t need to edit your .fla file if you want to change some photos.

This is not the only customizable thing: you may change perspective view, reflections, assign a text string to be displayed when an image is selected, scale images, change background color and opacity, skin the scrollbar and more!

Actionscript event detection

The component is designed to detect and trig specific events, so you can custom the behavior of your gallery… as an example, you can open in an external popup the photo you clicked.

Too complicated? NO!

Unfortunately, most components with a wide range of customizable features are too complicated for an everyday use and the software often come without a full guide.

This is not the case of photoFlow, that provides a well designed guide covering everything you need to know about this component.

If the guide shouldn’t be enough, there is a forum where you can post all your doubts and exchange knowledge with other users.

Pay once, use forever

For $59.95, photoFlow can be used to create an unlimited number of websites and there is a money back guarantee that promises to give the buy a 100% refund if he isn’t satisfied.

Overall considerations

I know there are tons of gallery/slideshow/whatsoever scripts out there, and for an amateur designer those $59.95 are… 59.00 too much for a Flash component, anyway I recommend this component to all professional designers who are looking for a quick and effective way to create interesting Flash galleries without spending time learning actionscript in depth.

At the moment I think you can setup only an horizontal scroller, but I hope you can transform the component to a vertical one somehow.

Definitely a good component.

Unfortunately, one of the “rules” for this review is not to allow comments. Anyway, I want to allow you readers to comment every post I write, because this blog lives mainly upon your comments. I want you to know to things:

1) I am ready not to be paid for this review because I allowed comments, but in my opinion your comments are more important than the fee for a review

2) Even if I don’t get paid, I confirm my opinion about the component. Definitely a good component.