I also knew nothing about self hosting, but wanted to move away from Google photos, and that eventually led me towards self-hosting and immich.

Most people recommend using something like Tailscale so you can access your server from anywhere. That wouldn’t necessarily work for me, because I wanted to be able to share links to pics and videos with friends/family who wouldnt be a part of my Tailscale network.

I ended up purchasing a cheap domain, and using cloudflare to allow me to share links broadly. (Because my family deserves better quality videos of my adorable children than the compressed crap that comes through in a group message between iOS and android. I have tried SO hard to convince them to move our group chat do a different platform but I have failed.). It’s probably ill-advised for somebody who knows as little as I do to go this route, but I’m filled with the un-earned confidence of a middle-aged white man.

Being tethered to USB each time even if you want to copy or view 1 photo will get incredibly annoying.

Immich will also give you lots of useful features like albums, tags, filtering, face detection (local), and supports multiple devices and users (do you have enough USB ports? :p) . These small features will turn more and more useful as your library grows.

You can first keep Immich working in your local network while you figure out tailscale, flexibility is a strong suit here.