you need to manually include them in the folder after you make the standalone, they aren't packaged as part of it (like Flash does, for example). I'm not totally sure if you need to tell the Standalone builder window to "include file..." or "include folder...". Try it without doing that, and if jit.qt.movie still can't find the files, try "include folder..." when you build. Should solve the problem. (I think it makes a specific search path available to the Standalone, but it's still a little mysterious.)

If you do a lot of switching between images, you'll have much quicker response time using jit.matrixset rather than jit.qt.movie, which in my experience has a brief lag when loading any file (even a single, small image file). jit.matrixset uses RAM to speed everything up.

thanks for responding so quickly! i really appreciate it -- although, it seems i'm unfortunately still stuck.

earlier i tried both "include file..." and "include folder..." while building the application, which didn't seem to work.

as per your advice, i've just tried manually putting the tiff files in the contents folder of the standalone -- which brings me to a couple more questions. is there a particular sub-folder i should be putting my tiff files in, and does the app actually read it as tiff, or should it be converted to some other file format in order to be read?

i've also tried manually adding a search-path (with the tiff files) by going into the max collective (in the contents folder of the finished app) and going to >options >file preferences to add folders. after doing that, i tried launching the app again... and still no image files. :/

it's interesting to see that jit.qt.movie finds .mov files just fine, but won't find any tiffs/pngs -- i'll try the jit.matrixset to see if that changes anything.

seems like i'm missing something so small! thanks for your help -- moving somewhere is better than not moving at all!

The file preferences won't affect the standalone, that's for the Max environment itself, as I understand it. So that won't help. You can make your own File Prefs to go with the standalone, but you shouldn't have to:

"You can add additional locations to this list by checking the Utilize Search Path option in the standalone object's Inspector." (from Docs)

This should do it, I think. Check the [standalone] object's Inspector and try the checkboxes, it should clear up several of your issues.

Very interesting about finding the .mov and not the .tiff. Probably I've been making mistakes in the past, but it sure seems like Max has some strange issues with not finding files when you would really imagine it would. For the .tiff I think it'll read them fine (don't know about multi-page .tiff if you have them). I stick to .png, but hey.

The jit.matrixset would save you hassle in one respect: you can store all your images within it, so it's just one big matrix file. Though it's probably just as easy to copy a folder of images around. the matrixset is most useful for fast switching/sequencing/loading.

Processing a project is too complicated for me. I used to choose a fine manual 3rd party TIFF processing SDK to help me read it and manipulate it. You can also google it and choose one whose way of processing is simple and fast. It can save a lot of time for you. I hope you success. Good luck.