How to Save Flash Animations From the Web

Flash animations and movies can't be saved from a web browser like pictures or text can. With a regular jpg or GIF picture on a webpage, you can right-click on it with the mouse and choose save 'Save Picture As...' from the menu that pops up. That won't happen with Flash. You will just get the Flash player menu options unless they have been disabled.

Saving a Flash movie or animation to be able to watch it offline or later on to study it would be handy. There are programs that can do that for you such as Sothink's SWF Decompiler which is a pretty good program for snaring and saving Flash programs in many cases for later reverse-engineering. Sothink will install a button in the upper right of Explorer, but it will not work all the time. But, you can find and save those files from the temporary Internet files in Windows if you use Internet Explorer with the following technique.

Double click My Computer, then the C drive, Windows, and find the temporary Internet files folder. Double click it to see it's files. It will have the HTM, HTML, jpg, GIF, MIDI, .mp3 and Flash (.swf) files. You can press Ctrl + F keys to bring up the Find menu and input *.swf in the Search for files or folders named: field, click Search Now button and you will see the Flash files come up on the screen. You can click the Last Checked button at the upper right a couple times to arrange the listing so most recent files are on top.

You can then click on the files to save them, open them or whatever.

This is also a good way to grab media video and sound files as well!

Please note that there is a section on grabbing and saving Youtube video files in the Blog section of this website. It's a good read for saving those videos before they possibly vanish from Youtube for whatever reason.

In my opinion, finding and saving Flash files from the Temporary Internet Files folder in Windows is a little easier within Windows Millenium than within XP - I can do both, but Me just seems easier. I have an old Pentium 3 computer running Millenium just for this purpose. On the XP laptop I have a desktop shortcut to the Temp folder to speed things up.

By playing Flash movies offline, this means using the Flash player which can enable use of the player controls. This enables advancing thru a movie one frame at a time can help reveal just how an animator did something that would be hard to see when that movie is playing within Explorer.