Which Plugin to share family photos/videos with extended family?

[HigherPrimate]

Hey everyone,

This is more than likely an extremely basic question but I'm new extremely new to this. I have a FreeNAS server I put together for home use. I have a little one on the way and is due any day now! What I want to do is have a central spot to store all our family photos and videos that I can share with my extended family members. I would like them to be able to upload photos that they take as well to it. I didn't want to use a cloud that already exists such as Google/etc as I will be moving large video files to it often and I don't want to be constantly paying for more storage. Plus the speed of uploading through my home network is way faster!

My first thought was just to use Plex but then I started reading about ownCloud. Which do you all think would work best for this? Or maybe I'm completely wrong about all of this and there isn't really a good way to do it. I am also concerned about security. Do I need to install a VPN onto the FreeNAS box? or do I just need to have a VPN set up on my phone/laptop or whatever is accessing it?

So far really liking the FreeNAS box! Can't wait to see what all it can do!

 

[danb35]

My first thought was just to use Plex but then I started reading about ownCloud. Which do you all think would work best for this?

I wouldn't do anything with Owncloud, but rather Nextcloud--but for read-only access, I think Plex would work better. Have your family members set up (free) Plex accounts, add them as friends, and they'll be able to see your stuff. If you want them to be able to add content, that gets trickier, and probably swings the decision toward Nextcloud, but you lose a lot of the indexing and gallery-type features. I've written a script to automate Nextcloud installation.

Both Nextcloud and Plex are reasonably secure; if you forward the right ports to the correct places a VPN shouldn't be essential. If you want to run one, the best place to do it is on your router (which might require upgrading your router).