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Controling Flash (the internet kind)

Flash. In photography it’s an amazing tool that lets you have light wherever you go. It allows you to simulate sunlight and create cool special effects. You should learn to use and control flash if you want to expand your lighting knowoledge (unless you plan on shooting only during bright sunny days and even then you should use it!).

Today though, I will give you a little tip on the internet kind of Flash. The Adobe kind. I’m a fan of Flash. From the beginning it allowed me to create cool animations and interfaces and my current photography website is in Flash (here). But Flash has a couple of trade offs and yesterday I found a cool solution for some of those trade offs.

As a tool to create internet ads Flash just bugs me. Flash is known for being “crashy” and taking up heavy resources from your computer. Advertisers use it to create bright, jumpy animations that can get pretty annoying. And here’s where my recommendation comes to the rescue.

It’s called ClickToFlash and it’s a Mac only option (let me know if there’s a similar product for Windows out there). You download it and run the installer and in a couple of seconds an invisible shield has been raised against Flash on the internet.

From that moment on when you are browsing the internet all Flash content will be blocked automatically. You decide which animation you want to see and which you don’t need your computer to waste resources on. To show you how this looks here’s a screen capture of the New York Times with the plugin installed.

See that huge gray rectangle on the right? Yep, Flash.

Here’s the page without the plugin and all Flash content loading from the internet:

As you can see I didn’t need to download that big ad on the right when I arrived at the New York Times. It’s not that bad (although it did have a distracting animation) but I do prefer not to see if I can.

Ok so what are the downsides? Well, check out the page for the Space channel without Flash:

And here’s the site with everything loaded. Funny, in this case the ad is a normal html banner but the content of the page is Flash:

Another nice thing about ClickToFlash is that there is a preference you can set that tells it to offer you a higher quality videoclip when you visit sites like YouTube (it’s called H.264 but that’s just for the geeks). With this option turned on you can now visit YouTube and if there is a better quality version in H.264 of your video it will show it to you instead of the Flash (lower quality) version.

Here’s where you can get the plugin…and I did say it was free right?

ClickToFlash site

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