PSD to SWF Converter

Turning Photoshop Artwork Into a Flash Movie

This page takes a .psd and produces a .swf — a Shockwave Flash movie holding your flattened artwork as a held frame, or several documents played back to back as a slideshow. It exists for one situation: a Flash-dependent toolchain that has to be fed and cannot be replaced. Legacy courseware, an older Adobe Animate or Flash Professional project, a kiosk or signage system whose ingest accepts .swf and nothing else.

Everywhere else, the honest answer is that Flash is finished. Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player on 31 December 2020 and began blocking Flash content from running on 12 January 2021; every mainstream browser removed the plugin in early 2021 and no setting brings it back. If what you actually need is the artwork as a picture, PSD to PNG is the end of the job. If you need motion that will still play in five years, PSD to MP4 is the same slideshow in a container that works.

How to Convert PSD to SWF

1. Upload Your PSD Files: Drag them onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Merge strategy opens on Merge images, which joins several documents into one movie in upload order; Video per image writes a separate .swf for each.
2. Set Image Duration: Artwork has no runtime of its own, so this control decides it. It opens at 5 seconds per frame, with the list running from a single frame (1/60s, 1/30s, 1/24s) up to 10 seconds per frame.
3. Check Background Color and Video resolution: Background Color opens on White and is what fills both your transparent areas and any letterbox space — this matters more on design work than on anything else, and is covered below. Video resolution opens on Keep original; Fixed Resolutions lets you name the stage size directly.
4. Convert and Download: Leave Video Codec on FLV unless you have a reason not to, click Convert and save the .swf. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are flattened and encoded on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

Transparency Is the Thing to Get Right

Design documents almost always have cleared areas — a logo on nothing, a cut-out product shot, a lower-third bar sitting over emptiness. No video codec on this page, or anywhere else, can store an alpha channel, so those areas have to become something.

They become the Background Color, which opens on White. The compositing happens before any scaling, so it is a clean flatten rather than a fringe artefact, but it is also permanent: once the movie is encoded there is no transparency left to recover. Two consequences follow.

• If the movie will sit over something else in your Flash timeline, this route cannot give you a keyed asset. A .swf from here is opaque. Build the composite in Photoshop so the intended background is part of the artwork, or bring the layered PSD into Animate and composite there.
• If the movie is standalone, set the colour deliberately. White is a sensible default for print-derived artwork and completely wrong for a dark interface mock-up. The dropdown carries black and a long list of chromatic options alongside it.

The same colour fills letterbox bars when your canvas shape does not match the frame, so picking a Fixed Resolution close to your document's aspect ratio removes half the problem before it starts.

What Happens to the Layer Stack

That last row is the one people most often hope is untrue. A build, a moving lower-third, a ticker — none of that can come from a flat document, because the converter only ever sees the merged picture. Animate the graphic in Animate or After Effects and export from there.

FLV Versus MJPEG, Measured on a Held Still

The gap is wider on artwork than on ordinary video, and the reason is structural: after the opening keyframe, every subsequent frame of a held image is a "nothing changed" delta costing almost nothing. MJPEG cannot take advantage of that — it writes a complete JPEG every second whether the picture moved or not. It also loses the Constraint Quality mode, which on a qscale codec is the most direct size control the page offers.

One label to ignore: the numeric field under Constant Quality is called CRF, because that input is shared with H.264-class encoders where the name is right. Neither codec here uses CRF. Both take a quantiser where lower is better, which is the reverse of what the label implies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which layer does the converter use?

None of them individually — it reads the flattened composite that Photoshop writes into the file alongside the layer data, so what you get is the merged picture as it looked when you last saved. That composite only exists if the document was saved with Photoshop's Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility preference set to Always. With it set to Never, only layered data is written, and non-Adobe readers have much less to work with. If the output does not match your canvas, re-save with the preference on and convert again.

Why will the SWF not open in my browser?

Because browsers no longer run Flash at all. Adobe ended Flash Player support on 31 December 2020 and started blocking Flash content on 12 January 2021, and the plugin was removed from Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari in early 2021. A valid .swf from this page still opens in the Ruffle emulator, in Adobe's standalone Flash Player Projector, and in the Flash-era authoring tool you are targeting.

How long will the movie be, and how many frames does it hold?

Image Duration multiplied by the number of documents, at one frame per second. One PSD at the default is a five-second movie containing five frames; four PSDs at "Merge images" with the same setting is twenty seconds. Encoding at one frame per second is deliberate — a held picture gains nothing from twenty-five identical copies a second — and B-frames are disabled for the same reason, since at one frame per second they push the stream's start time forward visibly.

My type looks fuzzy in the movie. What should I change?

Resolution first, quantiser second. Type edges are the hardest content for a lossy video codec: high-contrast boundaries produce exactly the ringing artefacts these encoders are worst at. Set a Fixed Resolution at or above the size the movie will actually be displayed at rather than letting it be scaled, and switch File Compression to Constant Quality with a low single-digit value. If type sharpness is the whole point of the asset, a Flash timeline will do better with the text as text — place a PNG or live type in Animate rather than baking it into a video frame.

Can I make a movie whose background is transparent?

No. No codec available on this page — nor on any video route — stores an alpha channel, so a cleared area is always composited onto the Background Color before encoding. For a Flash project that needs a keyed element, keep the artwork as a PNG with its transparency intact and place it in the timeline, or composite in Animate where layer transparency is a first-class concept.

What sets the stage size of the finished movie?

Whatever you select under Video resolution. "Keep original" uses your canvas dimensions, subject to the 4096-pixel ceiling applied before encoding. Fixed Resolutions offers explicit width-by-height pairs from 256 x 144 up to 8K, and Preset Resolutions sets height with width following your canvas aspect. Older Flash authoring tools are particular about frame size, so if an import is rejected, try a modest explicit size such as 800 x 600 before assuming the file is at fault.

Why is Specific file size not in the compression list?

Because the byte-size and bitrate modes are hidden on image sources rather than offered and ignored. What remains is Quality Preset, Constant Quality and — on FLV only — Constraint Quality. Of those, Quality Preset has little to work with here: on codecs without a CRF mode it scales the source bitrate, and a still image has none. Constant Quality is the control that moves the picture, and Constraint Quality's Max bitrate is the closest thing to a size lever on this route.

Can I control the order of a multi-document slideshow?

The files play in the order they were uploaded, so queue them in the sequence you want. There is no reordering control and no per-file duration — every segment is held for the same Image Duration. If a specific document needs longer on screen, convert it separately with Video per image and assemble the movies in your Flash timeline, where you have real control over timing.

What happens to my PSD after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, flattened and encoded on our servers, and both the upload and the resulting .swf are deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no watermark and no account is required. Layered Photoshop documents can be very large, so upload time is usually the slow part — flattening a copy in Photoshop first makes the whole job noticeably quicker.