I'm working on a photography site and we need to have a gallery of images with fading transitions between each image in the gallery. I was making a good deal of progress implementing this with jQuery but ran into a wall when the fade transition lost some smoothness and a lot of performance in Mac Firefox.

Here's where I'm sitting with the site. http://sandbox.exit42design.com/photography/

Basically since we're at a dead end with jQuery, what we're looking to do now is convert each image gallery to a flash module. I'd like to keep as much of the site in html and CSS as possible.

Can the flash module be positioned like any other html element? Static for example with other elements appearing above it?
How hard is it to scale and resize the image within the module? For example, it always has to be 100% the width and height of the browser window and be centered horizontally and vertically (basically like what I'm doing with jQuery right now)
And how hard is it to manage all of this? I understand content management systems, but am clueless when it comes to content management for Flash files.


So basically I'm wondering what the capabilities of Flash actually are before I shop around for someone to outsource this functionality to, is this pretty basic flash stuff that anyone with any experience can do?

Thanks,