Photo processing

This morning I was processing some photos of a Montbretia and Osteospermum.

In the afternoon I added metadata to some more Osteospermum photos, and also looked into moving my webhosting to HostGator. Unfortunately it seems that HostGator run ImageMagick 6.3.9, when I need version 6.5.4-10 or later, as there is a bug in earlier versions that can mess up the EXIF/XMP.

I also saw on their website that the maximum execution time for a PHP script is 30s, and they don't let you change this to a longer time. When dealing with large image uploads (like me), then 30s is too short.

HostGator also says that if you run a fast-cgi service (e.g. perl), then you can't change any PHP settings from their (HostGator's) defaults. HostGator run MySQL 5.1.3, which is quite an old version now (released 29 November 2005 I think), and I could be using functionality not available in 5.1.3, as I'm using 5.4 (I think I would probably be okay though).

Anyway, the maximum execution time for a PHP script means that I can't use HostGator.

I spent quite a bit of the afternoon just uploading photos to my photo website.

In the evening I watched the Germany vs. Spain match, Spain were too good at defending and intercepting passes for Germany.

I looked at GretzkyHosting, which had been advertising extremely cheap VPS packages, but they seem to have disappeared (no website). I then looked at Site5 hosting, but they use an even older version of ImageMagick than HostGator! And the MySQL version they are currently running is 5.0.67!