>1. A shared, collective archive of family photos taken on Androids & iPhones, stored privately, with some backup system.
This is something I want too but not app-ified. I just want a file server to serve a directory and some way to index and search photos without "apps" or web complexity.
> 2. A streaming server that can host the couple of shows my wife & I care about, plus shows we've selected for our kids. Our TV and laptops should be able to stream from the server.
I just use a file server (FreeBSD w/ZFS) and hook a Linux machine to a TV and bypass the TV app swamp. Then you just drag and drop all your TV shows into a playlist then set the media player to shuffle and repeat for random 24/7 TV.
> 3. Speakers placed in various rooms in the house (we have ~8 of them now) that are wirelessly controllable. When they happen to work, our Google Home speakers have been awesome with kids and with hosting.
You need all those speakers? One for each room? If you are entertaining guests usually everyone is in one space so a single portable speaker will work fine. The kids are usually off running around or playing video games not caring about your music selection. If they want their own music then get them their own speaker. Also, think about how those 8 speakers are now 8 pieces of e-waste. The less, the better.
Regarding your request for 1, have you looked into Immich [1]? If that's too much, I'd recommend bewCloud [2] (I've created it almost 3 years ago, still going well), since it's really just serving the files (search would have to match the file name, though).
> * The looming worry that one random whim from Google could wipe out my most valuable data (the photos & videos of my kids growing up).
This is where I would say you need to take responsibility for your data and make a physical backup using Google Takeout. I perform a takeout at least once a year and burn it to archival Blu-ray media. That might not sound convenient but it's the only way to protect your Google data.
Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats).
I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/
There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relatively robust homelab + NAS that will be able to host photos and videos (check out Immich), run a Plex server, and host other services probably using something like ProxMox.
It won't necessarily be easy, or cheap, and you'll be on the hook to keep everything running. But if you're into that kind of thing, it's super rewarding and fun.
So far, we have:
- Home Assistant managing our smart thermostats (Google Nest), smart plugs and light switches (Kasa), and other misc. appliances. Prior to this, I had like seven apps on my phone to manage all our devices and it was a PITA.
- Plex media server. We don't have a ton of digital media so this is very lightly used.
- Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.
- Remote access outside of our home network.
Next up on my list is pulling in our extensive photo/video library from various locations like Google Photos, iCloud, two primary iPhones into Immich. The wife and I are both running into storage issues on our phones because we have so many photos and videos of our kids. Don't want to delete them to free up space, and don't want to pay Apple every month to store them. Right now in the mean time, we're exporting photos from our iPhones to the Photos app in macOS, and then archiving them on a 1TB SSD. It works, but there's friction in actually viewing the photos after that.
Not sure about 6 since even for basic models, you'll have to reconsider your gear compared to something that just is a media server/basic homelab. But everything else is pretty doable with open source apps today.
But it is not hands-off and will never really be as hands-off as what google offers since thats basically a massive part of what makes it easy to use and something that self-hosted open source apps cannot do by design of being self-hosted.
Yeah if you know what you're doing, its not really a chore. Or I don't see it like that since I enjoy doing it and know my way around my system well.
But if you're coming from a non-technical background, its very different since there is also a learning curve and the fear that you might accidently do something bad to your system (and thats a problem if it contains important things like family photos etc).
>1. A shared, collective archive of family photos taken on Androids & iPhones, stored privately, with some backup system.
This is something I want too but not app-ified. I just want a file server to serve a directory and some way to index and search photos without "apps" or web complexity.
> 2. A streaming server that can host the couple of shows my wife & I care about, plus shows we've selected for our kids. Our TV and laptops should be able to stream from the server.
I just use a file server (FreeBSD w/ZFS) and hook a Linux machine to a TV and bypass the TV app swamp. Then you just drag and drop all your TV shows into a playlist then set the media player to shuffle and repeat for random 24/7 TV.
> 3. Speakers placed in various rooms in the house (we have ~8 of them now) that are wirelessly controllable. When they happen to work, our Google Home speakers have been awesome with kids and with hosting.
You need all those speakers? One for each room? If you are entertaining guests usually everyone is in one space so a single portable speaker will work fine. The kids are usually off running around or playing video games not caring about your music selection. If they want their own music then get them their own speaker. Also, think about how those 8 speakers are now 8 pieces of e-waste. The less, the better.
Regarding your request for 1, have you looked into Immich [1]? If that's too much, I'd recommend bewCloud [2] (I've created it almost 3 years ago, still going well), since it's really just serving the files (search would have to match the file name, though).
[1]: https://immich.app
[2]: https://bewcloud.com
> * The looming worry that one random whim from Google could wipe out my most valuable data (the photos & videos of my kids growing up).
This is where I would say you need to take responsibility for your data and make a physical backup using Google Takeout. I perform a takeout at least once a year and burn it to archival Blu-ray media. That might not sound convenient but it's the only way to protect your Google data.
Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats).
I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/
There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relatively robust homelab + NAS that will be able to host photos and videos (check out Immich), run a Plex server, and host other services probably using something like ProxMox.
It won't necessarily be easy, or cheap, and you'll be on the hook to keep everything running. But if you're into that kind of thing, it's super rewarding and fun.
So far, we have:
- Home Assistant managing our smart thermostats (Google Nest), smart plugs and light switches (Kasa), and other misc. appliances. Prior to this, I had like seven apps on my phone to manage all our devices and it was a PITA.
- Plex media server. We don't have a ton of digital media so this is very lightly used.
- Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.
- Remote access outside of our home network.
Next up on my list is pulling in our extensive photo/video library from various locations like Google Photos, iCloud, two primary iPhones into Immich. The wife and I are both running into storage issues on our phones because we have so many photos and videos of our kids. Don't want to delete them to free up space, and don't want to pay Apple every month to store them. Right now in the mean time, we're exporting photos from our iPhones to the Photos app in macOS, and then archiving them on a 1TB SSD. It works, but there's friction in actually viewing the photos after that.
Not sure about 6 since even for basic models, you'll have to reconsider your gear compared to something that just is a media server/basic homelab. But everything else is pretty doable with open source apps today.
But it is not hands-off and will never really be as hands-off as what google offers since thats basically a massive part of what makes it easy to use and something that self-hosted open source apps cannot do by design of being self-hosted.
You cannot eat your cake and have it too.
This.
I do all of this (except 6) on my own servers and don't rely on service providers for it.
> But it is not hands-off and will never really be as hands-off as what google offers
True, but it's also not a lot of work. I think I spend, on average, about 2-4 hours per month on maintaining my setup.
Yeah if you know what you're doing, its not really a chore. Or I don't see it like that since I enjoy doing it and know my way around my system well.
But if you're coming from a non-technical background, its very different since there is also a learning curve and the fear that you might accidently do something bad to your system (and thats a problem if it contains important things like family photos etc).