.Mac Web Galleries

I just picked up iLife '08 which includes iPhoto '08. The big addition to iPhoto and .Mac is the concept of Web Galleries. Web Galleries is the .Mac version of Flickr and PicasaWeb.

Yes, iLife '06 gave you the ability to publish web pages which you could turn into your own photo album web pages, but the .Mac Web Galleries is more...MUCH more than just web pages.

.Mac Web Galleries has an interface that is closer to iPhoto and iTunes except it's all done on the web with no fancy Flash plugins as it's all done with Web 2.0 technologies and Ajax.

I put up my own web gallery as an example of what the new web galleries can do. The color photo I uploaded from my iPhone and it showed up in the web gallery faster than I could say "refresh". The thumbnail slider control allows you to set the thumbnails smaller or larger. The Carousel viewing mode does a very good impression of iTunes CoverFlow browsing mode.

All in all, .Mac Web Galleries is a very good, and well-deserved, upgrade to .Mac, though it's too bad you need iPhoto '08 to activate the web galleries.

Also part of the .Mac upgrade is that user space has increased from a base of 1GB to 10GB. The data transfer limit has also increased to 100GB to a month.