Pictures finally going up!

I had a problem uploading photos recently but I've fixed (see below for the technical description). Props to my host, Powweb, for (a) having great phone support and (b) having fantastic hosting features, way better than most companies, especially for under $10 a month!

At long last, here are the new/updated galleries:

• Yelena's Graduation
• Jordan's Graduation, Cabaret, and Beer on the Beach
• Petaluma--updated to include Thanksgiving 2006
• Rockridge
• Yuri's visit, including Halloween in the Castro (people thought he was dressed up as Mr. Rogers)!
• SF Nightlife
• Home - more photos from the new apartment
• Pac Bell Park - updated to include Jew Night (no, really)!
• Civil War reenactments: Knight's Ferry 2007, and the San Francisco St. Patrick's Day Parade (we won 1st place!!!)

See below for the technical description of the problem & solution.

Technical description: Coppermine complained when I uploaded 8 megapixel photos that I had edited. These files were over 3.5 megs each. The problem was PHP wasn't getting enough RAM allocation on the server. Most hosting companies limit how much RAM your PHP programs can have, because obviously they're trying to limit the resources used by each client. I called Powweb, fully prepared to yell at them. Instead, the guy on the phone told me that not only would they be happy to raise the mem limit for php, as high as I wanted, but in fact they'd let me do it myself. So I set it to 64 megs and used GD2 to resize the pictures and now it works again! The guy at Powweb also told me that increasing the mem limit for php would make the site slower and I have noticed a drop in performance. When I'm done uploading the photos I'll reduce the mem limit to "normal" levels again (I'll have to figure out what that is).

"But Jordan, if you're resizing all the photos anyway, and don't allow full-res downloads, why even upload the full-res photos?" Because I'm selling these things. Yes, some people have actually bought my photos. I'm hoping it will increase in the future. Even though I don't display the full-res photos, they have to be on the server so people can get high-quality prints. I could resize all the photos to something slightly smaller, like 4 or 5 megapixels, but (a) that's a much longer workflow for me, and (b) the prints still wouldn't be as good.