A while ago I purchased a 7 TB hard drive, paired with another 2 TB on SSD for things that I need to access faster, and another 10 TB on a slower disk used for

A while ago I purchased a 7 TB hard drive, paired with another 2 TB on SSD for things that I need to access faster, and another 10 TB on a slower disk used for long-term backups. I plugged to a mini pc running Arch, put it in my utilities room, and I've been running my Nextcloud instance on it for a while. When NC media management became better (it's not on par with Google Photos yet, but there's a good app for Nextcloud Photos that now even supports face tagging, and even the media tab in the official app is now getting better), I just downloaded all of my Google Photos pictures, uploaded them to my server, spent a couple of days cleaning up the collection and fixing the timestamps, and I haven't looked back since then. Google is a parasitic company in financial distress because the primary source of its income (ads) is going through a major crisis, and they are desperate to make money out of other things, even if that means depriving the user of "essential" services by bundling email, photos and drive under the same meter. I decided long ago that I'm done with trying to understand the financial and product motives behind their deplorable decisions. And I'm done with them holding my emails, files and photos as hostages. And nowadays you can have a service that is almost on par with Google Photos. You just have to invest on a large drive, run your own NC instance, and use the right apps.