I've faced (and am still facing) this problem as well. I don't think there's a good single solution, especially for finding specific photos.

My current imperfect approach is to use Raycast / Alfred as a meta search tool to find things in various places. It doesn't unify things but it makes searching multiple places low friction.

Some specific tools, in case it helps.

- invoices, contracts, etc. go into paperless-ngx. Physical documents get scanned in.

- miscellaneous or unorganized documents into Nextcloud

- custom solution for searching text messages

- no solution whatsoever for images. I think semantic image search might do the job, although I haven't explored what tools exist for that.

Edit: formatting