A slide show of my images

PWCPhoto

Just experimenting with a flash slideshow program and put one quicky together using some of my images, most are people shots so thought they would go here.

Requires flash or shockwave and has music. Let me know what you think. THis was the first attempt.

Phil

http://www.pwcphoto.com/SlideShow.asp

Nordic

Hi Phil!

First of all, I think you have GREAT images in your slide show and on your site. I really love the first glamour portrait of the woman with the red dress, and the girl with the guitar, and the portraits with the leaves and the mist in the background. Really great work!!!

But honestly I think the slideshow doesn't do it justice. It took ages to load and some images don't look right, as if they were badly resized or something. And to my taste, the music doesn't fit to the images well.

I also had a look at your site. You have some great work there. I just wished there were bigger versions of some images.

Malte

I agree with Nordic, great images but something's up with the slideshow. When I loaded it the first time it went to 100%, went back to like 84%, up to 100, and so on 5-6 times. For me personally, I don't like music on webpages to load automatically or atleast I'd like to be able to mute it on the page.

Malte

gus

Malte wrote:

I agree with Nordic, great images but something's up with the slideshow. When I loaded it the first time it went to 100%, went back to like 84%, up to 100, and so on 5-6 times.
Malte

Yep me too...i sat there for a while whilst it coughed & spluttered trying to load...100%...97%...100% ...97% over & over. I left...sorry.

PWCPhoto

I scaled the images down to the native size of the flash application. In this case not to exceed 450 pixels high. Most of them were larger and flash was scaling them on the fly, which is the reason for the jaggies. Now they look a bit better. The file sizes are also smaller so it should load faster.

One thing it is doing is preloading all 19 ot the slideshow images, plus sound. I will see if I can get it to preload only the next image instead of all of them at once. It is a new applications so will take some time to get used to it and figure it out. I appreciate the comments, viewing it on a LAN the speed of loading is not an issue, but accross the net it is probably slower. This for sure is a DSL or cable only option, definitely not for dial up lines.

Thanks for the compliments on the actual pictures.

Phil

gus

PWCPhoto wrote:

I scaled the images down to the native size of the flash application. In this case not to exceed 450 pixels high. Most of them were larger and flash was scaling them on the fly, which is the reason for the jaggies. Now they look a bit better. The file sizes are also smaller so it should load faster.

One thing it is doing is preloading all 19 ot the slideshow images, plus sound. I will see if I can get it to preload only the next image instead of all of them at once. It is a new applications so will take some time to get used to it and figure it out. I appreciate the comments, viewing it on a LAN the speed of loading is not an issue, but accross the net it is probably slower. This for sure is a DSL or cable only option, definitely not for dial up lines.

Thanks for the compliments on the actual pictures.

Phil

Thats better...6 seconds from clicking to the first image Im running about 0.8 to 1.2mb down from Australia to a few diff mirrors in CA if its any help.

PWCPhoto

Thanks Gus, makes me feel a bit better. Still have a bit more work to do, but looks like it will be ok. Just have to make sure the images are scaled properly and not let the flash program do it.

Phil

Malte

Faster, but it still goes up to a hundred several times. If a progress bar can't be linear I'd rather have nothing at all, or just a "Loading" screen.

Malte

AntoineD

Hi,

I agree: the slideshow is quite slow to load and the music is an issue to me, especially when it's impossible to shut it off (besides, I'm not really into this kinf of music ).

I'm pretty sure the slideshow would be faster to load without the music.

One big issue to me, too: one cannot manually browse the slideshow, which is almost a non-sense today, with all the interactivity flash can provide to your visitors.
Did you design the flash slideshow all by yourself? If the answer's yes, you'll find plenty of very efficient flash slideshows on the web, for free or not.

In fact, as Nordic says, you've got beautiful pictures in this set but the slideshow definitely doesn't do justice to them.

mmroden

I believe it was on slashdot where I read that there are a variety of standards for load times and music.

For music, don't do it. It interrupts whatever music someone already has playing, or it starts up in the library where nothing should be played.

For load times, I think you only get a few seconds. More than that, especially with a progress bar that goes backwards, and you'll lose people. Sites that have flash intros with load times tend to lose 25% of their surfers right off the bat.

It's a hard thing to pull off, I think. For what it's worth, I really liked the pic with the girl with leaves in her hair.