So the difference here is you are manually doing a thing for your backups. Using a self hosted server and something like immich will seamlessly do it for you. If you drop your phone in the toilet and it breaks, the photos you took since your last manual backup would be saved.

Immich isnt meant to be a photo gallery viewer primarily, it is meant to be a self hosted photo backup service to replace stuff like icloud or google photos. So yeah, dont recommend it as a gallery viewer, recommend it as a selfhosted image backuo service.

I self host a jellyfin service on my nas, and keep all my movies and shows on that nas. I wouldnt be able to fit all that stuff on my phone.

I worked in an office that was paying out the ass for google drive. Setting up a self hosted nextcloud was a great solution and saved them a bunch of money, and still worked as a hands off “cloud solution”

If you dont want to run a separate machine to self host some services thats fine, you dont need to do it. its not for everyone. But plenty of people have reasonable motives for doing it.

Macast is pretty cool too. Think it uses upnp or something.

If you get a usb remote you can bind the home button to rofi or something similar to make a quickstart menu for apps and websites you use most often.

No, your laptop also connects to the hotspot. If you have available wifi at your location, you can then setup the pi to use that wifi and disconnect the phone hotspot, and just use the local wifi on all devices.

Ive just found this to be the simplest setup. I briefly had serial over bluetooth set up, and it was an easier way to change the pi’s wifi, but it broke pretty quickly for me not sure why.

Probably the most elegant solution is ethernet over usb, but thats a bit of a pain to set up.

For me a hotspot has been the least headache

What i usually do is set up a wifi hotspot from my phone, and connect the pi that way

Edit: just looked at your link. I think for the time being im going to use tailscale. Its a restaraunt, and they dont have a self-hosted server. Im trying to get around opening ports, so using an existing service. Your link did make me aware of cloudflare tunnels whick looks like it allows 50 users on a free plan vs tailscale’s 3. Although the 3 might work for them, I’ll have to check. Ill probably drop in an ngrok tunnel too so i can maintenence the pi remotely. (They are in a different state) i was mostly looking for advice on how to connect a port on one machine to another over a lan, and socat looks perfect

Actually, i found socat which seems to work just fine so far, and appears to be a standard linux command.

socat TCP4-LISTEN:8096 TCP4:192.168.86.2:8096

Thats a test i did with jellyfin at home

Oh that makes sense because when i originally set it up, i did want all traffic routed through it. I guess i didnt realize it didnt have to be

Something ive noticed from using wireguard from my phone is my traffic across the board slows down significantly while connected because everything is routed back home.

With tailscale can the user be connected, and only have a specific ip/domain routed through it? I also dont have access to the dvr’s internal system to run tailscale from it.

Anyway thanks for the lead, im reading up now

Jellyfin also has a web interface. http://SERVERIP:8096

Obviously, put your ip in there.

Well ill be darned. Thank you