[bluGill]

Something good for backing up my family pictures that I may or may not want to share with other family members or friends (but for sure don't want to share with random people).

Not shady is important. As is reason to believe that you are contributing to make the software you host better (as opposed to mooching off free software)

[andrey_utkin]

Maybe Nextcloud with its E2EE can do that, but I am not sure if it works to share the files with other people while protecting the files from the host admins.