So I need a user friendly self-hosted web-based image/file manager that can be customised/integrated.

Has anyone seen any good technophobe-proof solutions?

Either a complete package, or just good individual components - a friendly UI; a nice REST file management API; a decent image manipulation library; etc - stuff I can stitch together without too much effort.

I actually have two distinct uses-cases:

1) to replace the piece of shit worthless junk that the CMS we use at work has. Needs to run on Windows and handle Microsoft's crappy DFS. Also needs to be scalable - i.e. able to serve at least thousands of images per second on the front-end.

2) to replace the barely implemented attachment functionality of phpBB with something that even the most technically illiterate can use - i.e. drag a photograph and have it convert to a web-friendly version, giving clear feedback on success/failure/etc. To be hosted on Linux.

Even if it's not something I can use (i.e. closed source or remotely hosted) anything that might provide ideas for how to implement features would be good.

Thanks. :)

I did some testing with this: http://www.resourcespace.org/

Might do what you want :-O~~~ , or not :-@

Thanks, that looks interesting.

The main downside (from a quick look) is that it appears to be extendible via plugins rather than having an API. Hrm, and not sure about quality of the documentation. :/ Still I'll take another look tomorrow...

Forgot about this one:

https://owncloud.org/

I second ownCloud!  I've been using it for a year or more and I'm pretty sure there are API's you can use.

PB I set Resource Space up on my server to check it out.  If you'd like I can make an account for you and you can funk around with it to see if it will do what you're looking for.  I'm not real thrilled with it, it reminds me of an image gallery for Word Press or something but it might be just what you're looking for!  Let me know!

I thought it was pretty clunky.

Hrm, if it reminds you of a Wordpress gallery then I guess don't worry about it.

Thanks for the offer though. :)