For me all I really need in a photos app is reliable backup from my phone to my nas. My wife on the other hand, she takes lots of photos that she likes to organize into albums and share with family, so she’s really the deciding factor, i don’t think she really need the facial recognition, it may be useful but really it’s just being able to make albums, sort by month or year, share content, that kind of stuff.

I known this us a few days old but just wanted to chime in. I’ve been enjoying the “1 liter/mini pc” trend in home lab/server lately. I got myself a couple of hp elitedesk mini 600 g4’s for $120 each on ebay, they have an 8th gen intel i5 and support quicksync. If you’re patient you can find similar mini pcs for around the $100 price range, they’re generally cheaper than nuc or nuc clones and since they’re big name brands (hp, lenovo, Dell, etc all have a version of them) you can find parts for them easily on the used market.

For home lab/hosting you can get really good performance out of used/refurbished mini pcs, look for something like hp mini 400 g4. They can be found for around $100 to $150 on ebay. They generally fit a 2.5 inch ssd drive as well as 1 or sometimes two m.2 ssd drives. I find that intel nucs are pretty expensive compared to the specs, like you’re paying a premium for the brand and form factor since it’s a bit of a niche market. These mini pc’s are more business office oriented and are way more accessible at a lower price.

I realize you’re asking about storage, you could go the route of turning that old server into just a dedicated nas and use other hardware for your services/compute.