I am extremely happy with my photoprism setup. I tried to degoogle my life and found their docker setup to be great.
I use FolderSync on my android phone to copy any pictures I take to my photoprism WebDAV
I use FolderSync on my android phone to copy any pictures I take to my photoprism WebDAV
I've got an older Synology NAS that currently stores my 250GB photo library with a lot of RAWs. While it can run docker I'm not going to attempt to run it there. I'm wondering if a VM on my 10700k is going to be sufficient for great performance, or if handing over the complete machine is going to be necessary. I'm happy adding more NVMe 3.0 drives for storage.
I'm also curious how version upgrades have been for you. I want to get out of the ops business but I feel like I'm going to be dragged in.
Biggest thing was to put all the photos on SSD, at least the thumbnail cache if not all.
I also run it, on my backup server, pi 4, with all ai disabled, it's slower, but probably because it's all on HDD still usable.
I would say my requirements are nowhere near yours and that you would really need to test it yourself for your usecase. Some people on the photoprism forums claim it can handle large libraries like yours but I would always recommend testing yourself.
I host it via docker on a pretty tiny VPS with 3 vCPU and 4 GB RAM and it's fine.
Genuinely curious, if you use Android can you truly de google your life?
But, if you use grapheneos, they replace the google services with their own alternatives and sometimes let you disable the feature entirely. Also, on any rooted android. You can use AFwall+ to firewall any google connection or app. This way, even system services can't make network requests.
As far as I can tell, the only place you really need to be logged in to a Google account to get a "normal" Android experience is the Play Store, which makes sense.
I use Google Maps for example (Osmand when I can, but Google Maps is the only free app that has good traffic information) while not logged in, but my photos are hosted by Photoprism, my emails are not at Gmail, my backups are on my home server, etc.
I find myself largely independent from Google and if that's your goal, as opposed to trying to hide yourself from Google (which would be better, but I find it unrealistic for my needs), it's easy to achieve on an Android phone and certainly easier than independence from Apple on an iPhone.