My only advice would be to go full NextCloud at first for simplicity instead of trying to integrate it with other services.
That being said, if later on you're looking for a way to store images I'd highly recommend Immich, I just finished setting up my own hosting setup a few days ago and it is gorgeous.
Here in Scotland tourists are always fascinated when we talk about the wild haggis running around.
I always take out those paper ads that are attached to the top of the seat if front and turn them around so I'm not staring at them for a 5 hour flight.
Oh yes oops! I'm not sure why I thought polybar ran on Wayland, I probably was thinking of yambar.
Not for polybar but you might like to look into SwayNotificationCenter, I use it as the notification daemon of my hyprland setup and it has all the previous notifications in a menu with a do-not-disturb mode. I use a keybind to open up the menu but you could add an icon to polybar that when clicked runs swaync-client -t to toggle the menu.
That's great to hear. Hello and welcome to Lemmy!
In my experience combining multiple languages usually creates more complexity and is slower than each of them individually because you need to convert the data structures of one language into those of another. Both of them are great languages and I've made web services in both so whatever one you pick will be a good choice.
As for which one to pick, although Rust is my favorite language, if you don't know it it'll take a while to learn. So for this project I'd say to go with Go because it's simpler and you really won't notice a performance difference unless you've got a huge amount of traffic.
If you have any more questions feel free to ask!
Kind of, you can share individual albums so it is possible to share all but one. This may or may not be practical though depending on your album structure.
Another option is to share your entire library but archive the photos you don't want to be seen.
It would be good of there was an official feature for this but these are currently the two best options.