Almost all of these Hetzner Storage boxes in my experience are basically treated as appliances; you get it provisioned, install one piece of software to utilize

Almost all of these Hetzner Storage boxes in my experience are basically treated as appliances; you get it provisioned, install one piece of software to utilize the disks in the way you need, and then move on with your job. In this particular case I assume the OP is actually running some webserver on the box to serve up the photos to people, so the photos obviously need to be on the server as well for that to work. Most older photo sharing applications expect the photos to simply be discoverable through the filesystem. There are some advantages to this, for example you can leverage the filesystem indicies to get fast directory listings, organization can be done using hierarchical folders which users already know, et cetera. On the other hand, you have to manage things like this, occasionally. For a case like photo sharing I agree something like B2 is probably much better if it can be made to work. It's not too performance sensitive and outside of the photos themselves, there's minimal persistent state necessary for the system to function. Maybe there's a photo sharing application somewhere out there that is all "cloud native" (AKA runs in a container) and is designed to work with B2/S3 in this manner...