Joplin for sure. But I personally use Obsidian because of the UI. I sync it with my server using Syncthing. All devices are synced to the server and not with each other so I have one source of Truth.

Yep. Behind Nginx Proxy Manager and for external access, I use Pangolin on VPS to reverse tunnel to my Home.

I used to pay for Ente as well but then I tried Immich & IMO is just so much better. It is THE Google Photos alternative with almost all the features. And as you said, you can get encryption with LUKSing your drive or partitions. I have automated my backups so I am pretty much at ease especially after the stable release.

All photos in Ente are E2EE — only client devices can decrypt it. Immich doesn’t have any encryption thus allowing anyone who manages the server to view your photos as they are. Immich is fully self-hosted while with Ente you have an option for paying Ente or self-host. I honestly prefer Immich because the features outweigh the encryption as I own the server myself and Ente is a bit complicated to setup — I think you even have to deploy the entire Ente Ecosystem Stack.

If you don’t want to pay Immich for backups, you can take care of off-site backups yourself using tools like rclone to your hard drive or any off-site storage of your choice. A paywall here would be not allowing offsite backups at all unless you pay Immich.

Aah gotcha. I don’t remember exactly. I was using HA a year ago for about a month just to test around, but my home doesn’t have any smart devices so I got rid of it.

But as far as I remember, it was something in the HA settings itself (probably in the admin account or in the map). Just give location access to HA mobile app and it should work perfectly.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

Home Assistant does have location tracking feature where the phone app reports the location.