Reducing swf file size?

I know this issue has been brought up before, but I'm asking if anyone has successfully gone around it.
I'm working on a project that's a redux of an old multimedia project from the mid 90-s. It's 640x480 and uses a lot of full screen high color images. I'm only at the beginning of working on it and just running tests so far, but the swf files that I export are several megabytes in size and I haven't even started working on anything serious.
So my question is - has anyone finished a project that was image heavy and somehow managed to minimize loading times? Please share your experience, because that's the only thing that's stopping me from working on a project that I'm very excited about.

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high color images

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16 Million, the 65536 or 32768 colour depth?

The tricks are as usual: convert to 65536 or 32768 colours. Crop the images. Use Automatic Rotation at actives where ever possible. And the biggest saver: don`t use this much graphics. Flash is not meant to load the content of a DVD ;)

I know these "tricks", none of them apply in my case. I also don't believe it's an issue with flash, flash has compression. It's MMF that stores data raw.

Too many music files normally hurts my file size. Try turning down the bitrate.

Thank you. But I need something extreme.

[strike]Try turning down the bitrate while your hair's on fire[/strike]

MMF2 stores images with lossless compression by reasonable necessity - if images are the majority of your content that are taking up the space, you could perhaps leave them as JPGs and load them at runtime using StephenL's external files object for Flash.

http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=206388&page=1

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Originally Posted by Anatoly

Thank you. But I need something extreme.

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My game went from 11mb's to 7mb's when doing this.

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Originally Posted by DavidN

MMF2 stores images with lossless compression by reasonable necessity - if images are the majority of your content that are taking up the space, you could perhaps leave them as JPGs and load them at runtime using StephenL's external files object for Flash.

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That looks like the way to go for me. Thank you very much.

But still they don't load instantly it takes a while as well as there is a small bug in extension itself (reported) with setting size of graphic. Also you can't use it as active object - it's sorely for displaying purposes.

Yeah, I've read as much. :( Just out of curiosity - what is this reasonable necessity that justifies the gigantic file size?

with alpha channels, a single pixel on a single frame on a single direction on a single animation on a single active object... would use 4 bytes. (R,G,B,A) The more pixels/frames/directions/animations/objects you have, the more space it'll take up, to put it simply.

I do understand that. I just can't believe that it's still done this way. I revisit Clickteam products every 6 years or so and still can't believe that this hasn't been improved on. I bet this is gonna be a major problem with SWF exporter for new users, you could always compress regular exported files with something really good for installations, but here everything is just the way it is. I don't see the reason why some kind of an optional image compression is not implemented and the extraction is done in memory.

The image are stored with a zlib compression. So far, in rgba (we could work on this, true).
But the image has to be stored in a lossless compression : they are sprites, and every pixel is important.
So I guess that for the moment (appart from rgba) we do as much as we can...

PNG is a lossless format too :)

The best would be when the user could define the format. Bitmap, PNG, Jpeg ...

I agree.
Dear sirs, I've come back to clickteam products because I saw that SWF export was available and instantly thought - "That's what Clickteam needed! A lot of people who would like to make games and don't want to learn to code will go and buy the product!" and I instantly snatched a copy for myself. But now that I've found out that the size is still a concern I don't know how to go about this whole thing. I had a great project in mind that I knew I could pull off in MMF2, which would also save me a considerable amount of time and headaches. But now I'm considering other options.
I'm not trying to be rude (and I apologize if I sound rude), but I'm just bringing up something that will be (or already is) a big issue for an product that I think is great. I'm with Tiles here, it would be great if a user was able to choose between lossy and lossless compression (for background images maybe, where no collisions are required). Ping seems like a good idea since it allows for alpha channels.

Tiles, PNG uses zlib. ;)