From the course: Flash Professional CS5 Essential Training

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Differentiating symbols from instances

Differentiating symbols from instances

Once you start working with symbols in Flash it's really important to understand the difference between a symbol and an instance. In this movie we will look at the difference between symbols and instances and how to make edits on symbols verses making edits on an instance. Let's look at the Library. So I have several different symbols in the Library and I can click through them to show you. The simple difference between a symbol and an instance is symbols are stored in the Library and instances are on the Stage. So any thing that you actually see in a published application created by Flash is an instance of a symbol. Library is never really seen. It's just a place to store your symbols. So any time I select any instance on the Stage, you will see that it says instance of: the name of the symbol. So Instance of: Flower5, Instance of: Flower 5, Instance of: Flower 2 and then again Instance of: Flower 2. So on the Stage, there are instances and in the Library, there are symbols. So when…

Contents