I use Immich for sharing. Get some accounts set up for closest family so you can easily add them to albums. For others you can just share a link to each album, password protected or simply unlisted.

Personally, I run my internet accessible apps on my Hetzner VM behind a reverse proxy, whereas things like home automation, DNS and Octoprint I prefer to serve on my local network.

You can always set watchtower to blindly pull for you. If it’s going to be broken anyways, might as well automate the process.