Looking for a flash web design tutorial to help with creating an online photo gallery.?

I'm looking to design a photo gallery website within Flash, but most of the tutorials i can find online give flashy but impractical advice. How to make rotating menus or buttons that whiz around, none of which is useful for me. I'm good enough at coding and design to follow and adapt a guide, but not good enough to code it from scratch.





There's a sketch I've drawn here laying out what I want the different page elements to be and what I want them to do here: http://www.crazybadger.tsohost.co.uk/flash/gallery-design.jpg





And for examples of similar sites you could check out the gallery of Edward Almas here: http://www.erikalmas.com/ (pretty similar to what I'm aiming for) or Jill Greenberg here: http://www.manipulator.com/ (smooth and stylish, though a little too complex when it comes to working out how the site actually works. :oP)





I want sidebars that will hide unobtrusively when not in use, a none-looping contents bar that is scrolled manually, (Pulled by a slider by the site's user, not autoscrolling constantly.) and for a large preview of the image clicked within the contents bar to display in the center of the screen. It's not too much to ask for, so why are the majority of tutorials online 10 times more complicated and only about 1/5th as good-looking?





I want my own site and style, rather than a gallery at deviantart / flickr / or any other photo hosting site.





Advice on how best to do this using flash or CSS would be very welcome.





Thanks!Looking for a flash web design tutorial to help with creating an online photo gallery.?
Thanks for so much information you make our jobs a hell of a lot more easier when you provide such good detailed information.





It sounds as though you will be better working from a flash template, Have you been down this route yet? Unfortunately It would be hard finding 5 different flash elements which are freeware and peicing them together to make a full site so i strongly recommend getting the closest thing to what you want and changing the appearance of that template.





Here is the flashden link:


http://flashden.net/





Also its key when searching for features such as the image slider at the bottom that you use well known terms. For example the ';Image slider'; at the bottom is often referred to as a ';carousel'; in the flash and web community.





I would be happy to pass you any templates i have to help you out on this, but its important you find the best suited template on flashden before hand so that i can be specific on the effects and interaction quality of this flash site.





Hope this helps