Can you elaborate on the problems you found with those providers?

I mean, I don't imagine running OwnCloud would be unfeasible on a Raspberry Pi or anything (I can't speak to the performance of that), but you'd need to set up Dynamic DNS if you're planning on running it from your home, as well as a way to traverse the NAT. You'd also be limited by your upstream bandwidth, and I think most ISP's actually "forbid" running a server.

as far as deploying it on a VPS (virtual private server, so like an Amazon AWS instance, Linode, etc), you'd be limited by their TOS, etc, but I honestly think that's the best option. OwnCloud looks to be pretty simple to actually setup though, but I guess I'd have to try it out to checkout performance.

As far as I'm aware though, and as much as I could google, there's going to be some setup on your part.

So yeah, if you could elaborate a little more about what about each option didn't provide, we might be able to steer you closer to something that's acceptable.

I'm fine with handling devops on the server setup. It's also ok to do most of the moving around of files directly on the filesystem, not through the web interface. OwnCloud was just too fat and slow. The functionality I need in theory should be runnable on a Raspberry Pi (although I'm using a more powerful Odroid C1+). The only computationally heavy part would be generating thumbnails which is an up front cost. Everything else is just coordinated file serving.

Were you trying to run OwnCloud on your Odroid (Neat looking device BTW, I might have to try that out)?

I tried running that on a 20 dollar/month VPS from Linode, and it seems to work/perform great.

We can continue over email if you'd prefer, since I'm also interested in setting something like this up (me at robert-novak.com).

h5ai is awesome. The interface is fine. The problems I had were that the process of generating thumbnails is pretty opaque. It appears to start generating them when a directory is first visited through a browser, via a background task. However, it seemed like maybe the process stopped if you closed the page before it finished. So it became sort of this dance where I'd leave the browser open and monitor Top to see when the process finished. But even then sometimes it would freeze and thumbnails and previews would never load. Also it doesn't appear to do on-demand loading, so if you have a ton of photos in one directory it takes forever to load. The single and multi download features are perfect though.

Mediagoblin is ok for presentation but has basically no download features.

I look for something like this too. I have 100+GB of photos which need to organized and some must deleted. I don't have time to organize this, so other family members can do this from their computers.

This would be a nice feature.

I know Google Photos is not open source, but would that be the solution if you could get it on your own machine?

How would you upload the files? Through web interface? What about backup?

Uploading through a web interface would probably be too slow unless I'm on the same LAN. I'm fine managing the filesystem manually. So web uploading would be a nice feature but not necessary.