While I agree, but i tried Brave Search for a few weeks, and it seemed pretty good.

I wouldnt use Brave Browser, because Vivaldi is there (if you need Chromium.) But for a search engine which is free? DuckDuckGo maybe?

P.S. Kagi search is pretty good if you are willing to pay.

Ohh, I havent thought about backing it up with Syncthing! Thank you!

If you need a UI to have albums and share them then yes, the previously mentioned Immich. I host it as well, and it is truly awesome.

One caveat though: it is still pretty early in development, there might be breaking changes. For example a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.