Silicon Chisel

{mosimage}Publishing image galleries is a typical duty of web sites. While most CMS’s have gallery modules they don’t compare to the elegance of SlideShowPro. For a mere $20 you get a Flash gallery component with smooth transitions, image labeling, XML-driven albums, a gallery browser, per-album sound tracks, customizable everything, and lots of great URL integration features.

The product is supported by the devleoper, Dominey Design by email and a forum on their web site. There is plenty of well-written documentation both in a PDF format manual and on the web site. The online documentation includes several examples implementations, how to animations, FAQ’s, There is also a nice little community of people who use the product who have contributed to the offering with back-end scripts, desktop applications and applets, and more to help make using SlideShowPro easier and more effective.

Be warned, though. This is a Flash MX 2004 component - not a standalone application. The component needs to be put into a Flash presentation (.SWF file) and then hooked into the web site as such. This means the developer needs to know enough Flash to put together a basic presentation.

I have used this product in building a couple of sites and the flexibility of SlideShowPro lends itself quite well to CMS use. All one needs to do is point the component at the desired XML file as a tag parameter and it is possible to access any gallery in the catalog. Or with a little more JavaScript, start SlideShowPro at a specific slide in an album. For one Mambo-driven site it was little more than a 5 minute job to write a "Mambot" to access a SlideShowPro album.

SlideShowPro is a hidden gem and clearly one of the most cost-effective, and stylish, ways to integrate image albums into a web site of any kind.