Any website creator dreams that their users feel comfortable on their website. People tend to spend more time and do more activities on user-friendly websites, and abandon poorly designed and inconvenient sites without any regret. It is especially important if the user supposed to share data with others. Website should encourage users to do it, and they should not struggle with technical issues to contribute their content with your community.

For example, let's assume you want your users to upload multiple photos to your website. How you would implement it using standard HTML means? You would add several input fields with Browse button. The user clicks the Browse button, selects one photo, then clicks the next button to select one more photo, and do this operation until all photos are selected. Then the user clicks Upload button, and the browser sends an HTTP POST request to the server. When the request is sent, the user is redirected to the gallery page, or wherever you need.

Obviously, this upload method is far from convenient and user-friendly. Picking each photo individually may be fine for a couple files, but horrible for dozens. Another problem - the user has no idea how long to wait until the upload completes.

Fortunately, this is not the only method to upload files directly from a browser. Different browsers support different technologies to extend HTML functionality - ActiveX, Java, Silverlight, and, of course, Flash. The latter one is the most interesting platform because of a simple reason - it is available on the most computers regardless to the operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux), or browser.

If you have Flash development skills, you can create your own Flash upload application and integrate it with your website. But if you prefer to concentrate on functionality of your website rather than create Flash apps, you might look for a ready-to-use solution. And you will find a lot of them. A wide range of Flash uploaders are presented on the market - from open-source projects to high-class commercial solutions.

An example of such upload solution is the Aurigma Image Uploader Flash. It is ready-to-use upload user interface implemented as a Flash control that you embed to a page on your website with a few lines of code. When users open this page, they can add multiple files to an upload list with a single click. They see thumbnails of photos they selected, and can remove files from the upload list at any time. As soon as they are all set, they click the Upload button, and file upload begins. The user sees the progress bar indicating how long to wait until the end of the process.

Despite of its name, Aurigma Image Uploader Flash is able to upload not just images, but any other file type. However when you upload photos, you can use additional features - an ability to resize photos before the upload. Image Uploader Flash has flexible settings: you can configure resized photo dimensions, specify how many resized copies of different size to create and even to upload the original file or not. Why it is important? For example, if you store 800x600 photos on your website, but users shoot 5-10 MPix photos, pre-upload resize extremely increases file transfer speed and reduces your website traffic. And of course, you save a lot of server computing resources.

An upload component must be not just functional, but also have an appealing appearance. Ideally, the appearance should fit the design of your website. Aurigma's Flash uploader allows modifying visual themes without any programming, with a help of CSS - in the same way as you change the appearance of the website. Anyway, even standard visual themes are looking good enough for most websites.

Need to integrate the upload control more deeply to the workflow of your website? Aurigma Image Uploader Flash has versatile well-documented client-side API that allows integrating with the control through JavaScript. Moreover, if you are developing your website with ASP.NET or PHP, powerful server-side API is available as well. You can concentrate on essential features of your website - the upload part is already implemented there.