If I want to buy a small NAS that just runs Nextcloud and has a copy of my Google Photos library - what do I go with?

I don't have a ton of space so something that fits in the media center.

If you’re going to run your own NAS then consider swapping Google Photos out with Immich.

I know it’s not the question you asked but I feel not enough people know about it as an option and it’s really as good as Google Photos.

GMKTec G9. Four NVMe slots, plus some internal memory to deploy TrueNAS. It only has 12GB of RAM, but has two ethernet cards, acceptable cooling and performance and has a small footprint.

SSDs shall be single sided and gonna need heatsinks, but I believe it works well and is not tied to any manufacturer for anything.

If you want go all-out get ASUSTOR's Ryzen based systems. You can use the stock firmware or disable it without wiping it and deploy TrueNAS on it. It's a beast.

TrueNAS has containers and applications and VM support so you can run any service you want on it.

Google photos will become one way sync only in august. You can upload to cloud, but no sync to pc.