Thanks but the audience is family & friends. Basically a solution for small circles of people that don't want to share their private images/videos on Google, Facebook, Flickr or similar.

I don't think metadata will be a bottleneck in this scenario.. but maybe I am just naïve here.

I also consider just running a small box in the basement with dynamic dns instead of using a VPS.

No it won't matter for this scenario.

>> How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

>> You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

> Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

It's the problem of having too many small files. Explained here https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs#introduction.

> Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

Assuming you are replicating the data. You have to be careful of cascading failures if repairing replication is too slow because of slow network/disk-io/cpu.