POSSE
I've long kept my photo backups off of Google Cloud. I've never trusted them to keep them safe, and I've never trusted them to not do something with them I didn't want. Like, say, ingest them into AI training without telling me. (Which, now, everyone is doing.) Instead, I've backed up my photos to my own Nextcloud server, manually organized them, and let them get backed up from there.
More recently, I've decided I really need a proper photo album tool to carry around "wallet photos" of family and such to show people. A few years back I started building my own application for that in Symfony 4, but I ran into some walls and eventually abandoned the effort. This time, I figured I'd see what was available on the market for self-hosted photo albums for me and my family to use.
Strap yourself in, because this is a really depressing story (with a happy ending, at least).