I've resorted to sharing photos with family by uploading them to a 200GB EBS volume and automatically generating simple HTML pages that look like this:

    <html>
      <head>
      <title>My album name</title>
      </head>
      <body>
        <h1>My album name</h1>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3895.JPG" />
        <p>A caption!</p>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3899.JPG" />
        <video src="/videos/2015/04/IMG_3904.MOV" controls />
        ...
      </body>
    </html>
   

It literally took me a week's worth of evenings to scrap it together, and everyone in my extended family seems to like it. It's fast, simple, and I'm much closer to "owning" all my photos (the only intermediary is AWS).

I feel fortunate that I know how to do that, seeing what's available to the "average consumer." It's kind of sad. I have yet to find a photo sharing product that is not expensive, bloated, and buggy.