First of all don’t expose a machine on your LAN unless it is very well locked down especially with respect to ability to access rest of LAN. To simply access home LAN set up home VPN that has the access instead of opening up a port as powerful as ssh. If you open ssh then put it at some other port than the well known 22 and make it accessible by authorized key only. I would further limit where this ssh can be accessed from using firewall rules.

A lot of very useful software is not multithreaded. Hell, javascript is not multi-threaded.

What is wrong with a Synology NAS or TrueNAS? Plenty of apps for photos on or using such.I am falling in love with NextCloud for many things reasonably integrated together. Can definitely self-host that and share it or parts of it with others and collaborate with them if you like.
Dockerize all the things. That and/or kubernetes. I hear nice things about Proxmox in home labs but haven’t got around to messing with it.

What I know is that I have vastly more compute and disk at home than I can afford to run in any cloud. So it seems a shame to not use it - perhaps with a cloud front end and secured connection to the home equipment.

Yeah. I believe Cloudflare basically has its heart in the right place but it is is still a dangerous central choke point.

If you guard the machine well via firewall you can simply Let’s Encrypt for SSL via AAAA records to the public IPV6 address of one of your home machines with nginx reverse proxy.

Bitwarden, Paid addy.io, protonmail paid via crypto, privacy.com virtual credit cards, MySudo voip numbers, a jmp.chat number or two.

A 4090 is good enough for running many models. You probably want an A6000 for larger ones. But many models that don’t fit in your VRAM can be scaled down without much loss of effectiveness.

Paying Google loses privacy and control. You are paying a much higher real price than just the few $$.

Holy Shit and WOW! Very nice. So glad to find this. Thank you so much!

Well, YMMV may vary and seems to from the above. But for me self-hosting, especially on home machines, is largely about privacy and reduced cost as well as learning. Google in particular will hover up all data possible and profile you to hell and back selling the results. I used to use Dropbox and a higher price plan to get their [dubious] encryption and so on until I realized I could meet all my needs and more data across multiple machines with a NAS or NFS among other solutions.