Not even remotely an alternative in terms of usability/reliability, but I can describe my DIY setup.
I have a DIY NAS, based on a Raspberry Pi and an external hard disk enclosure, running in my kitchen. The disks are encrypted with LUKS. A combination of Syncthing and a cron job ensure that photos from my phone are constantly synced to the NAS without any input from me, and old photos are removed from my phone. A nice bonus is that if someone were to search my phone, they would not find many photos on it. I also never run out of space for photos/videos on my phone.
To view photos I use Shotwell. It does a decent if not perfect job of tagging, basic editing etc.
For encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups I use rsync.net and Borg, again together with a cron job.
All this crap is configured with Ansible in an effort to make it a little less fragile and more reproducible. It has been running without maintenance for a year or so but if you take this path, expect to spend many, many hours tearing your hair out over SAMBA Unix permissions and all sorts of other delights...
I have a similar setup, but with the Shotwell part replaced by Lychee. It's a self-hostable photo browsing web app. I can share photos with family members that way, like how I might share a google photo album to them.
I'm doing pretty much the same thing with an rpi/syncthing. It's simple enough and "just works", while maintaining full ownership of my photos/videos. I looked into Shotwell and it seems pretty nice. I haven't really used anything to organize my Photos so far. One might say it's well worth a shot (sorry.)
I have always made a separate user with no login for network shares, be it syncthing or samba and never ran into permission problems. The samba config is pretty friendly with permission options. If anyone has ran into problems I might be able to help.
I'm interested in your rassberry pi nas. Can it be done with a pi0? I've got one laying around and would love to put it to good use. I'm familiar with syncthing so it doesn't sound too much trouble for me right now.
I would expect that a pi0 could do it - depends on what sort of performance you want. An of course for a NAS you are better off with an Ethernet port - I would recommend a full-size SBC for this reason. But no fundamental reason why a pi0 can't do it. Here's a nice example: https://hackaday.io/project/8688-raspberry-pi-zero-altoid-na...
not OP, but I tried to setup a NAS with my older B+, and it was really unreliable. The disk went to sleep every few minutes even when there was a file being read/written.
Fwiw, I don't remember having drive problems when I used a pi zero as a small NAS. I do remember configuring the drives to never idle and spin down, though. I think I used hdparm and I definitely had a power supply that could support the drives.
I have a DIY NAS, based on a Raspberry Pi and an external hard disk enclosure, running in my kitchen. The disks are encrypted with LUKS. A combination of Syncthing and a cron job ensure that photos from my phone are constantly synced to the NAS without any input from me, and old photos are removed from my phone. A nice bonus is that if someone were to search my phone, they would not find many photos on it. I also never run out of space for photos/videos on my phone.
To view photos I use Shotwell. It does a decent if not perfect job of tagging, basic editing etc.
For encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups I use rsync.net and Borg, again together with a cron job.
All this crap is configured with Ansible in an effort to make it a little less fragile and more reproducible. It has been running without maintenance for a year or so but if you take this path, expect to spend many, many hours tearing your hair out over SAMBA Unix permissions and all sorts of other delights...