Sonopia picnic on the Kiev Sea
Last Saturday we had a picnic with co-workers from Sonopia. It was my first time when I was on the Kiev Sea, moreover it was opening of the swimming season for me. There were lost of sports activity, delicious meals (especially grilled meat) and social chatting.
The most thing I liked at that day, that there were no any commandments from anybody, and people were relaxed and were doing things they liked. At the same time, It seems that everybody was involved almost in at least couple of activities like playing football, swimming or supporting the campfire. Excellent rest for the excellent team 
Your current photo gallery engine is not perfect.
Go, get some Flickr love
It could be not the most perfect, but I still love Gallery2 because it is run on my hosting, and there are no any disk space restrictions and it is fully customizable. G2 is very flexible and can change appearance in large extent, up to looking like a Flickr
There are also plugins which can convert video files into Flash like YouTube do.
i understand your feelings about having all your photos on a reliable hosting and feeling that you are in control of the situation, but my point is that:
a) Gallery2 lacks social features. No friends, no comments.
b) No tag cloud for Gallery2, difficult to find anything for a visitor and for the owner to view some photos from the past.
c) the navigation between photo pages is not that sexy