December 14, 2005

Curious George: Image Slideshow effect? Webmasters: I need to display a series of images one after another in a loop. Just a simple effect right? I've had lots of trouble finding out how to do it . . .

I've found flash solutions (no) and promises of perl/CGI scripts (never actually get them though for various reasons). A site I've seen seems to be using Cold Fusion to do it (no). ? Is there any other solution? Currently I'm using Dreamweaver 4. I have only extremely marginal (read: barely) perl/CGi sk33lz.

  • javascript? here and here were the first i found on searching.
  • this one does incremental image loading.
  • Dang I thought I had scraped all the js sites. Thanks roryk! The first one you linked would be great, but I don't want any controls (so the second one will do I think) Anyone use something like this?
  • I've come close to having to do that, but fortunately I've always been able to get away with loading a random picture each time you refresh. That's a pretty easy one to set up, and keeps your visitor's browser from (freaking out | locking up | begging for mercy). If random-on-reload would work as a compromise for your situation, I'd definitely recommend it.
  • Forgot to say, I've had a lot of problems lately with javascripts. A lot of people's computers/browsers are set to disallow javascript for security reasons, and that number seems to be growing every day.
  • Yeah, don't use JS for something like this. It'll take 20 minutes in Flash, and everyone loves Flash. Why can't you use Flash? Flash, I say!
  • yeah the security warning is a pain in the @$% because the client uses IE (of course). But otherwise, it works great (thanks again roryk). Animated .gifs are not an option because of the picture quality thing, but more to the point, I don't know anything about flash. Don't I need something expensive to make it, or is there a l337 "flash generator" site out there or something?
  • One web designer keeps a website full of his own photography at couloir.org. It includes a couple of really super-slick javascript-based slideshows. There's some discussion on how it's done out there.
  • i'd forgotten about the javascript security warnings in ie )-: in an ideal world, you could consider svg, but browser support is not so good i fear. you might find some usable flash alternatives at sourceforge