Just start. Even the most tech savvy of us started not knowing any of this. More importantly do what you’re interested in and that benefits you. You don’t have to have some grand implementation. Start simple and the rest follows.

Personally, I’d say no. At that point you are administering it, not hosting it yourself.

The only issue I’ve had was when Immich doesn’t have enough memory. Immich is a memory hog and will slowly creep up its memory usage over time. Eventually it’ll crash and restart itself. Docker still shows it running, but the server its elf cannot be connected to.

It sounds like it might be related to this.

I usually use a dehydrator for ~3 days on my drives to make them shelf stable. So far I haven’t had any issues.