Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Extracting Images from SWF/Flash Websites

The Foragers Wins @ The Sussex Food AwardsMy brother is the head chef at the Foragers Pub in Hove. They recently won an award at the Sussex Food Awards. So far so good, apart from the tiny photo on the awards page and the fact that their pages are written entirely in Flash.

I know that the picture is available bigger, because I can zoom in, both by ctrl+mouse wheeling and using Firefox's zoom and by right clicking and using Adobe's zoom. However Firefox's zoom does not go far enough and I cannot scroll down the page while using Adobe's zoom. So to extracting the image, a simple enough task I thought. Except it's not, because the SWF file referenced by the HTML is virtually empty and once I had located the files they were apparently corrupt.

The best tool I found to get all resources used by an SWF is called SWF Web Vampire and if you need to do this a few times I would recommend buying it, $30 is not a lot of money.

SWF Decompiler, SWF Picture Extractor and the more Linux-y (ie, command line) SWF Tools all looked good, but all reported that the SWF image files I was getting from the website were corrupt. In the end I loaded them in IE and took a screen shot.

Incidentally I feel that the Sussex Food Awards have missed a trick here, if they made their photos easily available, but stamped their logo, and the logo of the company sponsoring the specific award on the image that would surely be a better situation for everyone involved?

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