immich is an extremely polished, FOSS alternative to google/apple photos. It's an investment, but a 4 bay NAS running immich should do nicely. Additionally I backup snapshots to Backblaze B2 via restic which runs another $5/TB
You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
Don't know how far along your career you are, but as a youngin', the occasional thought piece like this that introduces interesting new ideas and challenges me to reevaluate how I approach things have proven to be quite formative in retrospect