Check here first if you have a question about using SimpleViewer or SimpleViewer-Pro. Chances are your question has been answered already.
First check here to determine the version of Flash you have installed. If you have Flash 9.0.124 or higher installed and you still see the message, check javascript is not disabled in your browser settings. If not then there is probably an issue with the embed code in the HTML page that embeds SimpleViewer. Check the Embedding Guide here. Note that different browsers may have different versions of the Flash player installed.
This usually means you are viewing the mobile version of SimpleViewer. The mobile version of SimpleViewer is displayed when the browser does not have Flash installed. Check here to determine the version of Flash you have installed. Note that different browsers may have different versions of the Flash player installed.
If you see crosses where your images should be, check the following:
There are 2 possible causes for this:
You may be looking at a cached version of gallery.xml. Browsers will save previously viewed versions of files on the web for faster loading. To avoid this, you can clear your browser cache after making updates. To clear the cache in Internet Explorer go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Delete Files, or press Ctrl-F5 to reload the page without caching.
Visitors to your gallery will almost always see the latest version of your gallery. Most browsers check for newer versions of files on each browser session. Browser caching happens for all websites, so this issue applies to all files on the web.
To allow non-English characters to show, you must save your XML document with 'UTF-8' encoding (in Windows Notepad you can set this is the 'Save As' dialog). Check the documentation for your text editor.
SimpleViewer will scale down images to fit in the browser window. This is to allow the whole user-interface to appear in the browser without scrolling. Down-scaled images may appear to be lower quality than the original. To avoid this, either make your images smaller, or increase the size of your browser window. Also, check your maxImageWidth and maxImageHeight value matches the width and height of your largest image in pixel. You may also give your gallery a fixed width and height.
This message means the SimpleViewer SWF cannot find the gallery.xml file that describes the gallery. Make sure the gallery.xml file is in the gallery folder. Check Troubleshooting Pathing Problems.
Image colors may appear faded or washed-out when viewed in SimpleViewer. This is caused by the fact that Flash does not handle ICC Color Profiles. To make the image look the same in Flash and the browser, save your images without a color profile. Note that many browsers (including Internet Explorer) do not handle color profiles, so it is always best remove color profiles when saving images for the web.
To remove a color profile in PhotoShop:
To check if an image has a color profile attached, open it in Photoshop, then click the little right arrow icon at the bottom left of the image. Select 'Show' -> 'Document Profile'. An image without a color profile will show as 'Untagged'.
SimpleViewer-Pro includes a version of the SWF that supports ICC color profiles (Flash player 10 required). Check here for details.
When running a Flickr gallery locally you may see an error popup: 'Adobe Flash Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation...'. Flickr galleries will only work when uploaded to a web server. This is due to a security restriction in the Flash Player. If you want to run the gallery locally, you can edit your Flash player security settings. To do this:
This message means that SimpleViewer cannot read the gallery.xml file. This is typically caused by syntax error in the XML. To debug the error, open the gallery.xml file in a web browser. Most web browsers will report the specific problem and what line it appears on. A common error is to have a duplicate config option.
This message means that Flickr is not able to find the flickrUserName specified in gallery.xml. To get your flickr user name, login to flickr and look for the 'signed in as...' text at the top right. You can also get a Flickr username from a Flickr photostream url here (second field down).
If you have the correct user name and still get this message, check the Flickr user's privacy settings. Login into the Flickr account. From the top menu select You -> Your Account -> Privacy & Permissions. Ensure the 'Hide your stuff from public searches' setting is set to 'No'. Note that Flickr users under 18 years of age may not set this value to No, as part of Flickr's privacy policy.
The Flash player does not allow you to load images between different web domains (e.g. www.site1.com and www.site2.com) or different sub-domains (e.g. subdomain.site1.com and www.site1.com). This can be an issue when the SimpleViewer SWF file is on one domain and the images are on a different domain.
The simplest solution is to ensure the SWF file and images are all on the same domain and sub-domain. To allow loading images from a different domain, you need to create a crossdomain.xml file on the web server that is hosting the images. To create a crossdomain.xml file, create a new document in any text editor. Paste the following into the document:
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policySYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="www.simpleviewer.net" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Replace www.simpleviewer.net with the domain name that is hosting the SWF file. Save the document as crossdomain.xml. Use FTP to upload the file to the root of the server that is hosting the images. Now Flash will load the images from the specified domain.
Flash 10's color correction can cause color shifting on certain systems. If you are experiencing this, uncheck the useColorCorrection embed option in svBuilder-Pro. Check here for more details.
Some mobile networks perform 'Content Modification' on HTML content viewed over a 3G connection. This may cause SimpleViewer to break. Most networks add an option to 'Request desktop site' which bypasses the issue. 'Content Modification' by mobile networks not only breaks SimpleViewer, it breaks many websites that use JavaScript.
A solution for Apache web servers is to create an .htaccess file containing the following code and upload it to your website's root directory.
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Cache-Control "no-transform"
</IfModule>
For Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), details on how to set the Cache-Control header to 'no-transform' can be found on this web page.
View the Embed Guide for details.
You can add any HTML page elements such as a back button, menu or logo by editing index.htm in a text or HTML editor. View the Embed Guide for details.
Specify pixel dimensions with svBuilder or edit index.html and specify the height and width of your gallery in the embed code.
To have SimpleViewer appear under other elements on your page, check the backgroundTransparent embed option in svBuilder or set the bgColor parameter in the embed code to "transparent".
To give SimpleViewer a transparent background, check the backgroundTransparent embed option in svBuilder or set the bgColor parameter in the embed code to "transparent".
Check your CSS. Firefox requires that you explicitly set the height of the html and body tags, plus the div that contains SimpleViewer. Try setting them all to 100% or the height you require in pixels. For an example, check the CSS in the index.html file that comes in the SimpleViewer download.
For details on embedding multiple galleries, check here. Another option is to use Showkase, our complete portfolio website creation tool. Showkase allows you to create and manage multiple SimpleViewer galleries.
SimpleViewer uses jQuery for the embed code and Mobile gallery. SimpleViewer will not confict with other versions of jQuery or other JavaScript libraries that are included in the embedding page. When including jQuery, include it before simpleviewer.js.
Caption text can include a limited set of HTML formatting, including hyperlinks, line breaks, font tags, bold, underline and italics. Click here to view a list of HTML tags supported by Flash. Enter HTML tags directly in svBuilder or by editing the gallery.xml. For manual editing, you must wrap HTML formatted text inside a CDATA tag as below:
<caption><![CDATA[<font face="Times" size="20" color="#ffff00"> Big times text</font><b>bold text</b><u><a href="index.html" target="_blank">link text </a></u><br>New line of text]]></caption>
Title text can include a limited set of HTML formatting, including hyperlinks, line breaks, font tags, bold, underline and italics. To add HTML formatting with svBuilder, enter the HTML code directly in the title text box like this:
<font face="Times" size="32">My Title</font>
To add HTML formatting manually in gallery.xml, you must replace the following special characters with their XML escape sequence:
| & (Ampersand) | & |
| < (Left angle bracket) | < |
| > (Right angle bracket) | > |
| " (Straight quotation mark) | " |
| ' (Apostrophe) | ' |
So to add a large Times-Roman title use:
title="<font face="Times" size="20"> Big Times Title</font>"
Set the background color with svBuilder or by editing the bgColor parameter in the embed code.
To specify where the xml data is loaded from, use the galleryURL FlashVar option.
Images and thumbs can be loaded from any URL by setting the image tag's imageURL and thumbURL properties.
Set the frameColor Config Option.
To enable image opening and saving, set the showOpenButton config option to true.
You can also add text links in the image captions to open up the jpg in a new window. This will allow users to right-click the image and save it. SimpleViewer-Pro also includes a direct Image download button option.
To disable image opening and saving, set the showOpenButton config option to false.
By default, clicking the 'Open In New Window' button opens the current image in a new browser window. Alternatively you can specify a custom URL by setting the linkURL attribute for each image tag with svBuilder or by directly editing the gallery.xml. Image tags take the following format:
<image imageURL="images/tall.jpg" thumbURL="thumbs/tall.jpg" linkURL="http://www.google.com" linkTarget="_blank" >
<caption>This is my caption.</caption>
</image>
SimpleViewer can load JPGs, GIFs, PNGs and SWFs. Any other file types (text, video etc) are not supported.
SWF support is somewhat limited. SWFs that use ActionScripting may not work as expected when loaded into SimpleViewer. svBuilder does not support importing SWFs, but you can add a SWF manually by editing the gallery.xml file and adding an image tag. Note that you will also need to create and add a thumbnail JPG for the SWF.
To convert an existing gallery from v1.9 to v2 check here.
For SimpleViewer standard version, right click the SWF to see the version number. For SimpleViewer-Pro, check the readme.html file in the top level of the pro download for the version number.
When setting the galleryStyle option to COMPACT, SimpleViewer scales images differently than the other 2 gallery styles. Compact style resizes images to FILL the available Image Area. An image that has a different aspect ratio to the image area will be cropped to fit. The Image Area is defined by the maxImageWidth and maxImageHeight options and by the size of the SWF. The reason for this is to maximize the size of the image for small size galleries.
There are 3 ways to avoid image cropping:
By default SimpleViewer returns images sorted by date posted. Change an image's date posted by using Flickr Organize. Select an image and select Dates -> Date Uploaded.
SimpleViewer-Pro allows you to specify various sort orders using the flickrSort option.
Flickr sets are always returned in the order specified on the Flickr set page. To change the order, use the Flickr Organize page.
SimpleViewer standard version is limited to 50 images per gallery. SimpleViewer-Pro has no limit on the number of images per gallery (500 for Flickr galleries).
The mobile player provides a streamlined user interface to work with small screens on mobile devices. This means the gallery layout will not match the Flash gallery layout.
Due to a security restriction, Google Chrome can not load local XML files via JavaScript. This means Chrome cannot display the SimpleViewer Mobile player locally. The workaround is to use a different browser or upload your files to a webserver.
Customers who purchase SimpleViewer-Pro are eligible for free upgrades within the same major version number. For example if you buy version 1.2, all 1.x updates are provided free of charge.
To download the latest version of a purchased Airtight product you can re-use the download link sent in your original purchase email. If you cannot locate your original download link, please fill out this form.
No. SimpleViewer-Pro may be used to create an unlimited number of websites. Each purchase provides a single user (developer) license.
SimpleViewer-Pro may not be redistributed or resold to other companies or third parties. SimpleViewer-Pro may not be be redistributed as part of a content management system, online hosting solution or desktop application.
SimpleViewer-Pro does not include the ActionScript or JavaScript Source code. All config options are now configurable via XML. Flash developers who want complete control over the look and feel of the gallery can embed SimpleViewer-Pro into a Flash movie and use the ActionScript API to create a completely custom user interface. JavaScript Developers can use the JavaScript API.
We do not offer a trial version of SimpleViewer-Pro. We do offer a money back guarantee. If for any reason SimpleViewer-Pro does not meet your requirements, email us within 14 days of your order and we’ll try to resolve any issues. If we are not able to resolve your issues, we will give you a 100% refund.
Use the preloaderColor HTML Option
Use the backgroundURL Config Option to specify a relative or absolute path to a JPG or SWF to load as the gallery background. For example, to add a background image called 'back.jpg', copy the image to your gallery folder and add this at the top of gallery.xml:
backgroundURL = "back.jpg"
Set the firstImageIndex Config Option. View an example of setting the image index based on the URL.
Check the Layout Guide Troubleshooting Section.