However, Google Photos covers an aspect that this does not: it syncs the photos _off_ my phone into an online stream.
I actually use Google Photos because it's the only way of getting photos off your phone. The only other mechanism is iCloud, but if you don't have a Mac, there's no way to read from it.
For static gallery generation, I use a project called sitelen-mute.
https://github.com/kensanata/sitelen-mute
No affiliation with either tools.
My entire digital footprint is just 2 TiB, so the NAS has my back covered for several years now, and probably will for a few more years.
Does the encryption key also live in the NAS as well? Is it like, sitting there?
The older Gen8 boxes Just Work.
The newer Gen10 boxes hang the first time you boot, you need to pause it and set the hw.pci.realloc_bars loader variable to 1. Details here: https://www.virten.net/2017/10/fix-for-freenas-on-hpe-micros...
I have found this though, which lets me fetch the photos via iClouds (I guess I prefer that to google, and I can script it rather than do it via the web).
On Android something like Syncthing could be better for the job.
I would be happy to pay money to make this work properly.
In the meantime, I pay extra for Google Photos (for display/search/tagging) and iCloud (for reliable auto backup) and need to find a way to automatically download the iCloud things to my Plex/NAS machine.
I just want to take my data from here... and put it there... and not have it trashed along the way. I will pay money for this service.