Importing a Sequence of Images in Flash

You may often find yourself importing a series of sequential stills into Flash, rendered from programs like Premiere or 3D Studio Max. Unless you have hours, infinite patience, and masochistic tendencies, I’m sure you don’t want to spend the majority of your waking hours dragging each imported image from the library onto your stage and aligning it, one agonizing frame at a time.

That’s why it’s a good thing that Flash has a process for automating importing image sequences onto your stage and creating a sequential timeline of keyframes. All you need to do is make sure that your filenames start with the same string of characters, numbered in the proper order — for example, file001.jpg, file002.jpg, file003.jpg, and so on.

To start off, naturally, click File -> Import.

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Select the First File

Select only the first file in your sequence, and click Open.

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Answer Yes to Import Images in the Sequence

Flash will ask you, “The file appears to be part of a sequence of images. Do you want to import all of the images in the sequence?”

And of course, the answer to this question would be “Yes”.

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Check to Make Sure Sequence Is in Order

After that you can just sit back and wait; depending on how long your sequence is and how large the images are, it may take Flash a few seconds or a few minutes to import and arrange your sequence.

Once it’s done, check your timeline; on the layer that was active when you began to import your images, you’ll find the entire sequence arranged as properly ordered keyframes that you can view by scrubbing your timeline.