I use phonetrack, works very well and haven’t noticed any battery drain from it at all or it cutting out or anything like that. You can also configure how often it updates GPS/location on the server, can detect type of movement to increase/decrease polling and things like that. On the Nextcloud side I can share a map with my location and it updates a lot faster than Google does. Doesn’t look as polished but it works well.
I’m currently in the process of moving my family off of Google photos to Immich. Both my partner and I pay Google at the moment because we have to due to amount of photos. And that’s only going to increase.
Immich is great but there are also a lot of bugs. The shared albums that my wider family use for example is very buggy. So paying an amount that I might have paid Google for those bugs to be fixed while self hosting I would be very happy with I think.
However, I was thinking of attacking those bugs myself and contributing bug fixes to the project. But what happens now that it’s a commercial product essentially? Will they still accept code from pull requests from outside their organisation? Will any devs who spend a lot of time contributing get anything for their work? E.g. if I was providing time and code for a product then had to pay to use it that might seem a bit mean.