Hi Steve,
I don't personally know anything about AiFoto however I do believe I understand what your end goal is here. You should be able to achieve that using the following:
1. Using the ownCloud app on your phone to browse though images using thumbnails.
2. Access your ownCloud over the web or locally via SSL.
I agree that being able to sort through photos is next to impossible without thumbnails to see at a glance what a particular photo is. I've shared your frustration with the ownCloud app and the generic placeholder thumbnail, it's not very useful.
The issue with the thumbnails appears to have been resolved with the latest update of ownCloud server. I was previously using ownCloud app version 1.5.8 and ownCloud server version 7.0.4 along with PHP 5.3. After seeing your post I looked into this and have since updated my Asustor NAS with PHP 5.5.3 (Beta) and ownCloud server 8.0.2. Note that the new version of PHP will automatically be downloaded and installed on your NAS when you update ownCloud. I have also updated the app on my phone to version 1.7.0 which I believe is the latest version as of this post.
The upgrades went smoothly but took considerably longer with the PHP update on the NAS. Once complete I logged into ownCloud using my web browser and completed the update, this process was much faster. I had to change my default upload file size as it defaulted back to 51MB. I also noted under the Admin settings page that this error was being displayed: "PHP charset is not set to UTF-8. This can cause major issues with non-ASCII characters in file names. We highly recommend to change the value of ‘default_charset’ php.ini to "UTF-8". To fix this I had to locate the active php.ini file. I did this by accessing the following URL in my web browser:
http://HostnameOfNAS/phpinfo.php, you can substitute the hostname for the IP of your NAS as well. The active php.ini file is located here on my NAS after updating to php 5.5: /volume1/.@plugins/AppCentral/php-5.5/etc/php5/apache2 ... I edited the file adding the following line: default_charset = "UTF-8" ... I also edited a number of other settings based on my personal preferences such as max size, max post size, memory limit, max input time, max execution time etc. All these settings are important if attempting to upload either a large number of files or very large files themselves. I then saved the file and restarted my NAS. This got rid of the warning under the Admin settings page. I still receive another warning stating "APCu below version 4.0.6 is installed, for stability and performance reasons we recommend to update to a newer APCu version." This doesn't currently appear to have a negative impact on anything and my guess is that it's related to the Beta version of PHP installed.
*** Just a note that I use WinSCP to access all the directories on my NAS for administrative purposes. If you just right-click the file in WinSCP and select edit it should open it in your default text editor. When you make the change and "Save" it should auto save it to the NAS so that you don't have to download file, edit, save, upload file, overwrite existing file. It makes for much faster editing over using a utility such as Putty. ***
Once this was complete I browsed to my photos folder in ownCloud on my phone (using the app) and thumbnails started to populate. Images are now displayed in a grid format instead of the list format. This makes browsing through images quite easy as the thumbnails are larger. The only caveat here seems to be the amount of time for the thumbnail generation to complete. It took quite a while although I did have hundreds of photos. At this point you would have two options, either move your images folder under the ownCloud data directory or make use of Symbolic links. You mentioned you didn't want to move your folder so a Symbolic link will work fine which you can point at your existing photo library on your NAS. Just create the Symbolic link under your ownCloud data account directory, for instance: /volume1/Web/owncloud/data/youraccount/files ... I've tested this and it works great. The link name is arbitrary however the shortcut should point to where your existing image library resides on your NAS. For example: /volume1/mydata/pictures
As for SSL access, if you log into ownCloud via
https://webaddress/owncloud and then go to the Admin settings page you can enforce https access. At that point ownCloud will use the self-signed certificate on the Asustor NAS. You could probably install a 3rd party certificate on the NAS but I haven't tried. This would be done under Settings > General > Certificate Manager. So once SSL is enabled, whether you're accessing ownCloud locally on your LAN, publicly over the web either via web browser or your phone app it will all be SSL.
Cheers,
Jono