Organizing and structuring your Flash projects (part 3)

Creating layer folders

You can even organize your layers in folders, this is very convenient in some cases. Let's say you are animating a character with a head, arms, legs, feets etc. In that case you could have a folder named "my Character" with all the body parts inside that folder (fig9). The beauty of creating folders is that you can close them :) (fig10) therefore it's a winning key if you are trying to organize your Flash work.

fig9 fig10

To Insert a layer folder just click on the little icon at the bottom left of the timeline.


Organizing assets in the library

You have to choose a co-worker based on the state of their library when they work on a Flash project, which one would you choose ? the left one or the right one ?



There are two important rules to organize your assets in your library : give a descriptive name to all of them and group them by folders

To create a library folder just click on the little icon at the bottom left of your library.

Sometimes you might want to clean up your library from the assets that are not used in your project. You can do that by opening the Library menu (click on the top right of the Library panel) and click on Select Unused Items, all assets that are not used on the stage or dynamically used (using attachMovie) will be selected. You can then delete them safely.

Cleaning your library won't make your published file smaller because in any case just the assets used in the file will be compiled in the SWF. Cleaning your Library is just useful from an authoring point of view.

Be aware that all assets that you are planning to attach dynamically need to have identifier name in the Linkage properties in order for them to be kept out of the unused items list. If they don't have one they will be automatically selected and you might delete them by mistake.