Adobe open sources Flash gallery code

Posted 21 November 2006

One of the projects I led at Adobe during the past year was the development of a new generation of web photo galleries to replace the clunky old HTML galleries that have been in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for years. We built what I think is a pretty cool Flash application, which has some really nice features compared to typical web galleries. Most notably, it:

• Scales to fill the browser window
• Uses multiple image renditions (sizes) and uses the one most appropriate to the window size
• Performs intelligent prefetching of images
• Can be extensively styled via an XMLfile
• Supports video clips (FLV format) in addition to still images

This gallery is used in Photoshop Elements 5.0 and in Photoshop Lightroom, with different styling.

Now, for the news: Adobe has released the source code for the gallery as open source. This is a pretty large ActionScript program, which was written for Adobe by Bluefire Productions. You can get the code now from the Adobe Open Source site.

If you’re a Flash developer, you can modify the gallery program, or learn from it to produce your own design, and then distribute it to users of Photoshop Elements or Lightroom. They can install your design in either application and create galleries using it just like they can with Adobe’s standard version. You can even specify, using XML, what customization controls you want presented in the application. There’s a tutorial on how it works on the Flash Developer Center (coauthored by yours truly).