@Marcus This is Rahul from rtMedia (BuddyPress-Media plugin) team.

We started rtMedia because, we wanted a private social network with image management. BuddyPress gave us a simple social network we were looking for. As there was no media solution present for it, we developed rtMedia.

BuddyPress is easy to use. Non techie users are more comfortable with front-end upload as compared to backend upload. So I hope your family will like BuddyPress (with rtMedia).

@Sarah thanks for writing about gavickpro. It's a nice theme. rtMedia users will like this. We will include it in our supported theme list soon. :-)

@Lee Batten I am sorry to hear frequent rtMedia updates caused pain on your end. We will be more careful before pushing CSS updates. As of now, we notify theme developers about upcoming changes in well advance via emails. Please let me know if a developer from your team wish to be added to this email list?