Yoruio

I just realized that this is the homeassistant community and not something more generic.

Specifically for homeassistant, Wireguard should be fine, unless you plan to do some more advanced stuff like use Alexa without a nabu casa subscription.

The times where you need access to your HA instance without being able to connect to Wireguard should be pretty limited.

To use Wireguard, you need to:

1. provision a client tunnel for every device, or at least every person who needs to access your network
2. have Wireguard downloaded and installed on every device, with the tunnels all imported.

Basically, Wireguard works really well for services that only you use, on your own devices. You set it up once per device, and you have access to every service you host on your network.

For the DuckDNS / reverse proxy route, you need to configure the reverse proxy for every service you want to expose, but don’t need to configure anything on the end user’s device.

For Jellyfin, since I have users that are not me, it is impractical to expect them to go through all the hoops to get Wireguard running just to watch some movie or tv show. I also don’t want to make new Wireguard client tunnels for every single friend that I add to my jellyfin server. This also means I can access jellyfin on devices that aren’t my own such as a friend’s TV.

For immich, my phone is a bit wonky with keeping Wireguard connected in the background, and I just don’t want to worry about if I’m connected to my vpn just so my photos will get backed up.

Different services for different use cases.

I use nginx reverse proxy behind Duckdns for anything that requires public access, or that I use very frequently, like jellyfin or immich

I use Wireguard for everything else, to expose as little as possible.

If anything, I would say that Duckdns is harder to setup than Wireguard. You will need something like nginx reverse proxy if you want to host multiple services, and also deal with SSL certificates.

I don’t remember much about plex photos, but facial (and object) recognition, photo map, easy sharing through albums (without the other person needing an account), and being open source are some features I imagine plex photos does not have.

it seems barebones still, because it is a very young app, and the UI is not great, especially on mobile.

It is the best replacement for Google photos that I have seen though.

+1 to immich

However, because of the fast dev cycle, it has a lot of breaking changes, and needs regular maintenance (most notably for me, postgres docker changes. Especially if you are not giving it it’s own postgres instance and using their provided docker compose.)

You could stay pegged to a single version, but the mobile app also doesn’t have full backwards compatibility with server versions, which results in a slew of other problems (how do I do a fresh install of an older app version on a new device?)

But if you are willing to keep up and perform semi-regular maintenance, immich is great, and the rapid dev cycle means more new features faster!