Immich full stop, like everyone else has said. self hostable so as much storage as you can buy (and maintain backups of!), AI so you can search your photos like “sunset on beach”, and just rock solid, despite it “”“technically”“” still in pre-release stage

shred or alternatively you can zero out all the bytes in a drive with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<DRIVE>

if you know/use docker, the solution that has been the most straightforward for me is SWAG. the setup process is fairly easy when combined with registering your domain with Porkbun, as they allow free API access needed for obtaining top-level (example.com) as well as wildcard (*.example.com) SSL certificates.

along with that, exposing a new service is fairly easy with the plethora of already included nginx configs for services like Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.

I still find Tealdeer useful even now, it helps me get working with commands I know little about, more so than a manpage

I tried both MQTT and just the plain HTTP variant, and I couldn’t get either to work. I’ve fully settled on the latter you mentioned, Traccar. it’s pretty much what I’ve wanted: self-hosted, easy to set up, beautiful web interface. Thanks for the suggestions!

for two reasons, I can’t use this.

1. Android. Me, my family. Our past phones were, our current phones are, and future phones will be Android phones.
2. I’m looking for whatever it may be to be OSS and self-hostable (if the community name didn’t give that implication away)

OwnTracks setup was a bit confusing to me and I never got it working. traccar looks pretty nice though, I’ll check it out!