2 Question about Frame Labels... and play commands

I have a photography gallery I am working on. There is a short intro, and then a stop command. The menu then is coded to advance to frame labels, so when you click a photo, the timeline jumps to the label and shows the photo, giving the illusion of photos loading, when really you're just jumping around the timeline to view the different images. I hope that I explained that correctly.

Each "photo" section of the timeline (there are 17) has a frame label at the beginning, and a stop command at the end, so when you click the menu, it jumps to the label, the photo fades in, and then it hits the stop.

This works fine and I am happy with it, but I am wondering if there is a way to put in some sort of command where there could be a "play slideshow" where the user clicks once, and the ENTIRE timeline plays, ignoring the stops, and plays the photo sequences all in order. Basically, I want it to override the frame label and stop commands and just play the entire timeline when the user clicks that button. Something like a "force play"... not sure if that is possible.


My other smaller questoin is this: Is there a way to make a previous/next button for this with the command to just "go to next/previous label". The photogallery is 90% done,and I want a simple way for people to linearly progress from label to label, but I don't want to code each one differently. I am pictureing something in my head like "gotoAndPlay next label", so when clicked, the action would just go to and play the previous/next label.

If anyone has any insights to this, they would be appreciated.

There is no way to override the frame's actions. What you could do, with no great effort, I might add, is make a different timeline/MC with the slideshow. The easiest way to do this is to copy all your frames and paste them somewhere else without the stop actions and labels (like after the last pic or in another MC, as I said before).

About going to prev/next, there is a way to do this: if the pictures' fade-in tween is on the same timeline as the button, you could add goTo (currentFrame - number.of.frames.in.tween), for the PREV button where "number.of.frames.in.tween" is obviously the lenght in frames of the fade-in tween and nextFrame or simply play() for the NEXT button. (note that this is not the correct syntax, you'll have to look into it 'cause I don't know much about AS).
If your timeline is not how I pictured it, you may have to code each NEXT/PREV button differently.

The "go to frame plus X" would work perfectly, nice idea. My "sections" of timeline are all exactly the same.

I can't really copy the whole timeline and remove the stops though, the file would be too big. Its already a large file, I'll just plan my next project differently.

I'll look in to doing the frame jumping though... gotta find the code somewhere.

If anyone could give me a hand with that code, I'd appreciate it. I've been searching, and so far I've only found out how to do it in Swish, but not in actual Flash actionscript.

What are you talking about?! If you copy the frames, it's just more instances of the same symbols. It doesn't add to the file size much, it only adds the references to the frames and instances. Plus, you might want to look into optimizing animation for file size if that's a problem. The 1st thing you could do is use more JPEG compression for your pics.