They support arbitrary locations on external SD cards on Android yet?
On Android 10 and older, Syncthing can only "read" form SD cards (read/write works if you're rooted).
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/android-11-and-syncthing-what-...
In the newest versions of Android you give it Scoped Storage.
In the intermediate, if you want 2-way sync on your phone, your data has to live in sdcard/android/media/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid/<sync folder1 >, <sync folder 2> which it does not need root to write to.
But for just grabbing your pictures, Android 10 has the stupid limitations on external file system access that Syncthing has to abide by or root over.