An .fla is the working file of Adobe Animate, called Flash Professional until 2016: the drawings, symbols, timeline, sounds and ActionScript behind a Flash animation, game or banner. The .swf that played in browsers was made from it. Adobe has stopped selling Animate, and nothing else opens an .fla, so old projects found in a backup, files sent by a former designer and course work from years ago are hard to look at without a subscription.
This page reads the file itself. It draws any frame of any scene or symbol from the shapes, gradients, bitmaps, text and symbol instances in it, plays the timeline at the document’s frame rate, and lists the layers, keyframes, library and scripts. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline. Nothing is sent to a server and no script in the file is ever run.
- How do I open an FLA file without Animate?
- Open it on this page. It shows the frames, library, timeline and scripts, and saves frames, bitmaps and sounds, all in the browser. Editing it again, or publishing a new .swf or video from it, still needs Adobe Animate. If you only have the .swf, the SWF Player plays it.
- Will a frame look exactly as it does in Animate?
- Shapes, gradients, bitmaps, symbols, masks, colour effects and the common blend modes were checked against Flash Player’s own pictures of test files, and match closely. Not drawn: filters (drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel and the rest), the add, subtract, invert, alpha and erase blend modes, 3D rotation, the camera layer, bone (IK) poses, video, compiled clips and components. Shape tweens show the shape at the start of the tween. Artistic and brush strokes are drawn as plain lines, and ovals with a start or end angle or an inner radius as whole ovals. Custom eases are followed at an even pace, and curved motion paths as straight moves. Text is set with fonts on your device, so it can look different. The page lists what a frame uses that it does not draw.
- Does it run the ActionScript?
- No. Scripts are shown as text only, so a frame looks the way Animate shows it on the stage while editing, before any script moves or hides things. A mask or animation set up by a script is not applied, and movie clips play as if no script stopped them.
- Can I get the pictures and sounds out of an FLA?
- Yes. Each bitmap in the library has a Save button, and Save all media puts every bitmap and sound in one ZIP, in the library’s folders. Where Animate kept the original imported file inside the .fla, that original is saved; otherwise the picture is rebuilt from Animate’s own lossless or 256-colour layout as a PNG, a JPEG is saved as it was, and a sound becomes a WAV (imported WAV sounds) or an MP3 (imported MP3 sounds). A sound kept in a layout the page does not recognise is saved unchanged as .dat.
- What about older .fla files from Flash 8, CS3 or CS4?
- Those are kept in Flash’s older binary format, which is not documented. For them the page lists what is inside and saves the bitmaps, but cannot draw frames or show the timeline. Opening the file in Animate or Flash CS5 or later and saving it again turns it into the newer format, which opens here in full.
- What is an XFL file?
- XFL is the format inside every .fla since Flash CS5: an .fla is the XFL project zipped into one file. Animate can also save it unzipped, as a folder with a small .xfl file, DOMDocument.xml and LIBRARY and bin folders. Choose that folder with Choose an XFL folder, or zip it and open the ZIP.
- Is my FLA file uploaded?
- No. It is read by this browser tab on your own device, and nothing in it is sent anywhere.