I’m finally moving apocryph.org over to FutureHosting from DreamHost. I’ve put it off for so long because my 35+GB photo gallery will be a real pain to move over, and will use most of the 40GB of storage I have allotted on one of my two VPS accounts.

I really wanted to move my photo hosting to Picasa Web Albums, on account of the awesome new face detection/recognition feature they have in beta, but in the end I was swayed by value.

Here’s the price schedule for Picasa Web Albums:

• 10 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
• 40 GB ($75.00 USD per year)
• 150 GB ($250.00 USD per year)
• 400 GB ($500.00 USD per year)

Here’s the schedule for Flickr:

• Unlimited ($24.95/yr)

Since I’m almost at 40GB, inside of a year I would be spending $250/yr for Picasa storage. Sorry, but face recognition coolness isn’t worth that sort of a premium.

I’m currently in the process of migrating my entire gallery over to Flickr using the Gallery2Flickr plug-in for Gallery 2.

Last weekend I was playing with the new beta of Google Picasa 3, including the new Picasa Web Albums.

I’ve used the Picasa 2 desktop photo management software for a couple years now, and been mostly happy with it. It can upload directly to Facebook, and it’s not too hard to upload to my Gallery 2 site either. However, I’ve never seen the point in paying for the Picasa Web Albums photo hosting service, when I can host my own photos on my own site for no extra charge.

That changed last weekend, when I discovered the Name Tags feature in Picasa Web 3. This is what I thought Facebook was doing a while back. The idea is simple: after you upload your photos to Picasa Web, Google detects all the faces in the photos, and asks you to name them. Google then uses facial recognition technology to guess the identities of future occurrences of the same faces.

This past weekend my little sister and I were going through the Facebook profiles of various cousins, and I noticed something about Facebook’s photo support that I somehow missed before: it automatically detects the presence of faces in each photo, and allows users to tag each face with the identity of its owner. Already-tagged faces have the owner’s name superimposed over the image.

I just upgraded the Gallery install on bonzo to 2.2 RC1, which has some cool new features like dynamic albums, and (supposedly) performance improvements. It seems to have worked fine.

I just noticed that the Gallery project has released RC 2of Gallery 2.1. This version finally includes support for hidden items (photos and albums which are not visible to guests browsing albums, but are accessible to guests if they know the direct URL of the item), and password-protected albums and photos. Both of these basic features are handy for sharing photos with a limited group of people, but not everyone.

The download was uneventful; I extracted the tarball over my existing 2.0 installation, as per the upgrade instructions. I then navigated to my gallery, and was greeted with an upgrade wizard.

After authenticating with the setup password, step 2 of the wizard is an environment check. There were no reds, but I did get some warnings:

Warning: Output buffering is enabled in your php by the output_buffering parameter(s) in php.ini.