Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats).

I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/

There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relatively robust homelab + NAS that will be able to host photos and videos (check out Immich), run a Plex server, and host other services probably using something like ProxMox.

It won't necessarily be easy, or cheap, and you'll be on the hook to keep everything running. But if you're into that kind of thing, it's super rewarding and fun.

So far, we have:

- Home Assistant managing our smart thermostats (Google Nest), smart plugs and light switches (Kasa), and other misc. appliances. Prior to this, I had like seven apps on my phone to manage all our devices and it was a PITA.

- Plex media server. We don't have a ton of digital media so this is very lightly used.

- Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.

- Remote access outside of our home network.

Next up on my list is pulling in our extensive photo/video library from various locations like Google Photos, iCloud, two primary iPhones into Immich. The wife and I are both running into storage issues on our phones because we have so many photos and videos of our kids. Don't want to delete them to free up space, and don't want to pay Apple every month to store them. Right now in the mean time, we're exporting photos from our iPhones to the Photos app in macOS, and then archiving them on a 1TB SSD. It works, but there's friction in actually viewing the photos after that.