barbarabeirne.com: Archive Recovery & Web Components Rebuild

I recovered the photographs from Barbara Beirne’s non-functional Flash site and rebuilt her portfolio around them. A later Web Components rebuild added keyboard navigation and a full-screen carousel.

A boy holding a rock to his ear. Image by Barbara Beirne

Recovering a Flash archive

Barbara Beirne’s photography archive was held inside a Flash website that had stopped working years earlier. The original source files were unavailable, and the original developer could not be brought back into the project. Before I could rebuild the portfolio, I needed to recover the photographs from the published site.

The surviving file was a compiled .SWF. It contained the images, but it was not an editable source project or a folder of photographs ready to move into a new website. That made asset recovery the first part of the development work.

Recovering the images

I used FFDec, an open-source Flash decompiler, to extract the images embedded in the binary. Getting clean exports took additional work, but I recovered the full embedded image set and used it for the initial rebuild.

Black and white image of three Cambodian teens standing in front of high school lockers — Image extracted from the compiled Flash file using FFDec.

Recovering those assets gave the project usable photographs again. It also let the new site present the work without depending on the Flash application that had previously contained it.

Rebuilding with Web Components

Once the archive was recovered and the initial site rebuilt, I returned to its web presentation. I rewrote the site with Web Components and JavaScript, using Rollup for the build and Sass for styling.

I implemented keyboard interaction for the navigation and full-screen carousel. Visitors could use those parts of the interface without relying on a mouse.

Presenting her images

We chose a minimal, stark design to give Barbara’s photographs room. The navigation and viewing controls had to support looking through the archive without dominating the page.

The full-screen carousel provides a larger view of a photograph, while the navigation supports moving through the archive. That made room for sustained viewing as well as moving on to the next photograph.

A group of children climbing on a large pile of debris, one waving the Ulster Banner. Image by Barbara Beirne

Feedback on the recovery

Alison Cornyn, an artist and the co-founder and creative director of Picture Projects, wrote after the recovery and initial rebuild:

“Daniel came up with suggestions and solutions that were beyond what the original site had and brought it all to life.”

Alison Cornyn.