Wake on LAN won’t work remotely, so you’d either need to have access to a VPN at their location, or have a 2nd always on device that you can connect to and that could then WoL to your device… or… get a device with an IPMI which you remote into. (All non-VPN forms of remote connection are open to abuse)
I suspect (guess) you’re not going to be able to setup a VPN, so perhaps an always on pi is going to be necessary - so maybe it’ll be that with drives set to spin down when idle?
OpenMediaVault was my preferred choice until everything went docker on it which was getting too complex for a NAS… so I just created my own, which powers on at certain times of the day and off again when CPU / network IO was low enough.
Data transfer with syncthing is great, but I don’t really recommend sync for snapshot backups… (consider your files are all corrupted, it’ll happily sync those corruptions) but I have enough space for a few versions of my files, so in theory I can roll back, but it’s cetainly not a Grandfather, Father, Son strategy.
The main point is that sync (like RAID) isn’t a backup. If ransomware got in and started encrypting all your files, how would you know / protect yourself…
There’s a lot of focus on 3-2-1 backups, so offsite is good, but consider your G-F-S strategy too - as long as this remote copy isn’t your only long-term backup option, then sync might be ok for you
So, syncthing / rsync / etc is fine… but maybe just point it to your monthly / weekly / daily backup folder(s) rather than the main files?
You also had some other suggestions I think, like zfs / btrfs snapshots… which would be a point in time copy of your files.
Or burn the photos to DVD / Bluray and store them at the other location? No power requirements there…