Flash Library Management

The Library Panel in Flash is where you store all the assets needed to complete a Flash project. The nature of Flash development leads to libraries filled with false starts, unused elements, extraneous imports and general disarray.

Here is my solution that I use for every Flash project I work on. A well managed library can save hours of frustration and speed up the development process. In team based development it's practically required. Of course this is not the only way to work - treat this as a starting point for you to develop your own personal organization that works best for you and the type of projects you work on.

Here are the folders I create to manage my assets and some elements I start every project with (see screen shot at bottom of post)

00 Code Snippets

My favorite trick. this one is so good it's getting its own post and download next week. but the short answer is it's a movie clip with hundreds of lines of sample actionscript code that I can refer to during any project. the clip itself is never used in a movie but it's a fast, fast reference for quick copy and paste.

01 LTG

Stands for Layouts, Templates and Guides. Stuff that should not appear in final movie but is needed for placement purposes.

02 Imported Images

Imported JPG, PNG files.

03 Imported Vector

Vector art from other programs.

04 Imported Audio

Short audio pieces or sound effects less than about 2 seconds long. I always leave longer audio as an external file.

05 Basic Shapes

A simple square and circle that I use over and over in every movie. Why the awful lime green? It's easy to tell if there is a stray, unmodified occurrence in my movie. I also add any artwork that is not animated (movieclips with just one frame of art) to this folder.

06 Buttons

Buttons go here, this folder always starts with an invisible square button (built from the square in folder 05 Basic Shapes - reuse your symbols!)

07 Text

Movieclips with text.

08 Components

If I use any prebuilt Flash components they would go here.

09 Reserved for future use

As the name implies I'm not using 09 for anything right now.

10 Temp

holds test movieclips and experimental work. When and if these become part of the movie they move to a more appropriate folder. If they don't go into the final movie they go to folder 99 below (the trash). At the end of a project this folder is always empty.

11 Project Specific

folders 00 thru 10 are part of every project and they stay in that order for consistencies sake. Project specific folders holding complex parts of the movie always start at 11 and may have folders nested inside.

12 Project Specific

Just another example folder for this project.

99 Trash this

The 99 makes it sit at the bottom of the library panel. I consistently move unused elements to this folder as they are replaced by final or improved artwork. If it's in this folder it's not used in the movie. I delete this folder before handing the file off to the client. I do keep the folder in my master file.