I wish you had separated Tailscale and traditional VPNs

I did this with the thermal sensor. 2x noctua 5V fans and an old phone USB power adapter. Works really well though the fan runs at a set speed.

You’re asking great questions. Photography was the main reason I bought into Synology because other cloud providers are way too expensive once you get over 2-3 TB.

First I’ll say your use case does not fall into the light duty if you want to meet all your requirements. Likely you will want a 4 bay NAS with NVMe cache drives. That will most likely be the 923+ or even better the 1821+.

You’ll want to use raid over SHR as it is more performant. RAID 5 for 4 disks. RAID 6 for more than that.

If you don’t have 10GbE networking at home don’t worry about NVMe. Hard drives can easily saturate a 1GbE network. Though if you have it, it’s really nice and NVMe storage is per cheap right now. 2 1TB sticks will work great for photos. I doubt you’ll run over using Lightroom if you’re working with a single photo set. Also keep in mind your internal network speed vs your outbound network speed. I have 10GbE at home, but if I’m somewhere else, Comcast kills me at 35mbps upload.

That said, you’re looking at probably $1200 bucks.

To make it safe with a backup add another Synology with more drives. A backup should be on another device, though it doesn’t need to be fast.

As far as accessing things from anywhere, that’s more a question of your home network. You can set up a VPN or tailscale and accessing your NAS as if you were at home. That can be set up regardless of what device you choose.