https://immich.app/

I'm running Immich.

If you have a really robust Internet connection you can reverse proxy into your home server. Make sure it's SSDs though.

For me I just have 2 people so we share 1tb of a VPS and that satisfies the photos everywhere itch.

I don't care about photos, hardly take any, so can't give you an exact answer, but I assume self-hosting is the best approach.

i use Synology Photos on my NAS, its fast, convenient, and the data stays mine. I simply pipe it through Pangolin and can access it from anywhere, my phone library is always empty.

I had the same dilemma, after self hosting Immich for a while I decided on Ente.
There 3 main reasons why I went with Ente over Immich for my family photo/setup even though Immich is perfectly cromulent and easy to setup (and I have the infra)

1) Ente gives 3xS3 storage backups with compliance lock. I was a bit nervous being in charge of uptime/backups of my families photos, this offloaded it to Ente. Once you add in the same replication the self hosted cost increases a bit.
2) Following on from point 1. Immich doesn't easily allow you to encrypt the photos at rest across users, or at least not at default. I didn't want access to my dads photos.
3) One of my favourite use cases of google photos that ente has (and immich doesn't without scripts) was automatically recognising a face of my daughter on all our families gallerys and moving them to a shared album.

I could get past point 1,2 but adding in 3, it made me just want to offload the hastle.

Theres 5 people using my Ente instance at £10 a month (£2 each). I also keep a running local backup of my gallery too.-----

Proton Drive? I am skeptical about this one. I know Proton is more secure on paper. But it is like going from 1 walled garden to another.

I use Proton for a few services and I think this is an unfair comparison, while you're right to be sceptical and Proton aren't perfect, they're much better than Google.
You need to move to a service that you can egress easy and proton does allow that.

I run Immich on a cheap dell desktop I got off ebay (7th gen i5 CPU in it), it has 2 HDDs in a mirror and sends encrypted backups to online storage at Backblaze using Restic.

A European hosted bucket and a selfhosted immich instance