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.

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.