For image hosting I would look at Immich. It aims to be a full Google Photos replacement. It isn’t quite there yet, but it is quite featureful and rapidly improving.

I wouldn’t follow the advice of using Immich. While its a great tool, growing fast and super polished, its currently aimed at photo backup from your android phone/tablet and is not a good pick for a family photo gallery.

To that end I would look into pigallery2 or the very good homegallery, which is still in early stages as well but also quite polished and already working great. They will not replace Immich, but will complete the workflow nicely.

My photo management flow (which includes your requirements, plus the capability to organize new photos over time) is here https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=services:photomanagement if you are interested.

In general the flow is to buy or recycle a pc of anykind, install linux (optional, but recomendes), buy a domain you like from some registrar, setup some kind of remote access from outside to your home, and install the services you want.

The workflow mandatory includes hours spent trying and failing, and also having tons of fun in the process. Don’t forget the WAF (Wife Appreciation Factor) which will determine how much fun you can have.

Last, i al documenting all my steps and proceedings while I run down my own selfhost rabbit hole in the above linked wiki (self hosted, ofc).

See you around, I guess!

The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

As for your domain question:

1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.

Sorry man, I am on mobile so I keep missing parts.

As for hardware, I would recycle anything you have at home if it has at least 8gb ram and a network card. Specially laptops (low watts consumption and built-in battery in case of power outage) are my favourites. But if you want to spend for new stuff, the low power N100 are all the rage nowadays.

For storage, go with at least two disks or ssds or nvme in RAID1 (and keep in mind that is not backup, which you should plan to do), they can be external USB drives as well, provided you spend some good money and don’t go cheap on the USB enclosure. Mine have been working perfectly for the last decade.

1. An old laptop is the easiest to start with, but you might eventually run into storage limitations with it. But in general getting an older one and putting a bigger SSD into it is usually sufficient (but look for one that can limit battery charging to 80%). Otherwise a thin client or a mini-pc is good, but they don’t come with a built-in UPS or Keyboard/Screen for quick troubleshooting.
2. Domains cost pretty much the same everywhere, but I think in your case OVH is good. They give you a free email service and dynDNS for free with every domain purchase, so that takes care of the difficult stuff like email hosting for notifications and the like. It also includes a free 100mb webspace you can use for that static site and not worry about your server being online all the time.
3. IPv4 only is no problem. You need to see if your ISP gives you a dynamic public IP (so no NAT) and if the router you are using allows access to configure port-forwarding.

More.

I agree nextcloud might be a very good solution.l, specially because all the service you might need are there. The fun factor decreases tough.

Also, while cloudflare is heavily sponsorized in this community I disagree. It’s probably the easiest approach but you end up depending on a specific service. Renting a cheap vps (virtual private server) and setting up a VPN or ssh tunneling is the best approach, but slightly more complex. In exchange you are free to migrate to a different vps at any time with basically zero downtime.

Using a VPN is clearly the safest approach but has two limits:

• more complex setup for you users
• cannot expose public services (like sharing photos with friends outside family, or sharing your resumee)

Using ssh tunnels to make your internal server accessible on port 80/443 of the vps instead gives you the maximum freedom, but you run higher risk unless you secure it properly (service separation, https with let’s encrypt, strong authentication and so on…)