Great to meet you and it seems like the community is in good hands. Thanks for the work you’re doing!

I do agree FUTO voice is certainly good, the only thing I’ve found that can understand my Scottish accent.

Syncthing for everything: file transfers, backing up phone photos, synced obsidian vaults, etc.

I used to use VSCodium (pretty much just VSCode without the closed source binaries and telemetry) but now I completely use Helix and Zellij.

Kind of, you can share individual albums so it is possible to share all but one. This may or may not be practical though depending on your album structure.

Another option is to share your entire library but archive the photos you don’t want to be seen.

It would be good of there was an official feature for this but these are currently the two best options.

My only advice would be to go full NextCloud at first for simplicity instead of trying to integrate it with other services.

That being said, if later on you’re looking for a way to store images I’d highly recommend Immich, I just finished setting up my own hosting setup a few days ago and it is gorgeous.