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A Quick, Free and Easy Way to Get a Flash Slideshow on your Site

Flash slideshows can be quite time consuming to create, and there is often the need to upload files manually to your server to make the slideshow run correctly. But there is a simple way to make a Flash slideshow and then use it on your Freeway page - without having Flash or any other application.

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is an online photo organizing, sharing and storage service which lets you upload your photos to their server, organize them into sets or collections and then share them with your friends. It also offers a very quick (and free) way to get a Flash slideshow working on your Freeway page.

First you need to sign up to Flickr. Once that's done, you need to upload the photos you want to use in the slideshow to Flickr, which you can do very easily using Flickr Upload (downloadable from http://www.flickr.com/tools/). Organise the order of your slideshow online, click the Slideshow button, then click on "Share" when the slideshow starts to load.

In the next dialog you will see an option for "Grab the embedded HTML". The default slideshow size is a window of 400x300 pixels, but you can click on "Customize" to choose a larger size. Click on "Copy to clipboard" then go to your Freeway page. In Freeway go to the page you want the slideshow on, go to Insert>Markup item, paste the copied code into the dialog and click OK. There is no live preview in Freeway, but it will display when you preview in a browser.

As with all free services, the Flickr method displays with their branding on the skin, and will only allow you a fading transition between photos. However, as it's a Flash player there is an option for visitors to view the slideshow fullscreen by clicking on the fullscreen button on the controller bar. Also, as the photos are all on Flickr's servers there's no need to upload the photos to your server.

We believe this is the simplest and most elegant way to get a slideshow on a Freeway page for free.

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