Is there anyway to randomise the order of pictures in Flash or animated gif?

I need to make a flash banner/animated gif with 6 static images that appear one at a time.. My trouble is that the banner will be put on the frontpage of a site and as such people will probably only see the first and maybe the second picture before they click on to a subpage.

Now my question is, is there anyway to randomize the order in which the pictures will appear each time somebody reloads the page?

I have the option of working in flash or animated gif, but I aint a shark in either..

Any comments/advice are appreciated

 

You can do this in your coding (with a bit of java? ) instead, it might make things a bit easier.

 

Hmm could you maybe elaborate a bit on this?

As mentioned I am not exactly a shark in flash.. Or Java for that matter.. Would that be pretty straightforward to do?

 

I think by "Java" they meant "Javascript" which is scripting many people use for dynamic (changing) stuff on webpages.

I don't think you can do this with an animated gif; however, with Javascript you may be able to have an image area with static images (gifs or whatever) changing every reload. This would only show one image per reload though, and it would have a seperate image each reload, so you have several different image files the user's browser must download.

You can do this with Flash using Flash's own Actionscript (which is a lot like Javascript). I would use teh Googles to see what free codes are sitting out there showing people what to type for these. Remember that many people don't have Flash player, and you must learn Flash. Anywhere from 5-20% of users don't have Javascript (but that may include bots, which don't react to Js at all).

Keep in mind also if you choose Flash to use a valid version of HTML to set it on your webpage (NOT the crap that Flash itself spews out when it makes an html version of the film), using only the <object> tag so you can put child images in so people without Flash player can still see a nice image instead of a white empty box : )

I would choose the programme you're more comfortable with for making the ad first (Gimp/Photoshop, or Flash) and then go from there with the ActionScript/Javascript needed.

 

Thank you very much for your very informative answer!..

A bit of green rep coming your way