Have good privacy practice. Even better if I can get away from 5 Eyes or 9 Eyes.
Have an application for Android that supports auto-sync.
Self-hosting is also an option, but I would prefer a lightweight setup. I checked Immich requirements, but it requires 2 CPU cores and 4 GB memory, which costs way too much if I want to host it on my AWS.
Yes. But I have mixed experience with this. How well it works might depend heavily on your internet speed (up/down) and on the performance of the synology. Overall user experience is a lot slower than any other commercial service.
Thanks for the cool option. But I just checked, and it seems like there's no way I can set up a QuickConnect ID without a real Synology hardware. I'm a nomad so buying a physical Disk Station is not my preference.
Nextcloud? there's a bunch of private hosts you can sign up for, and some even do free plans which might be good for getting started. The first one I found (alfacloud) did 100gb for €5/month.
You can self host immich on a device as small as a raspberry pi. Waveshare sells a CM4 board + enclosure + power supply for $36. You can get a 1tb 2242 nvme ssd for $99. And you can get a 4gb CM4 + 32gb emmc from adafruit for $65 (currently out of stock there, but you can keep an eye on rpilocator. some capable boards are available in Germany, but they're over $100). Not the cheapest setup, but if you're worried about power draw, spinning hard drives, and portability, this would be a way to do it. You could also just host NextCloud on it, but it might be a bit slow.
I moved everything from Google photos to ente about a year ago. They have an importer that made things pretty easy. I set up my android phone to auto import too.