This is the best and most cohesive answer.

I use all these things mentioned with a deezer hifi subscription and deemix running as a lidarr addon, that way all i have to do it select an artist on lidarr and boom ive got their discography in minutes.

As for discovery, listenbrainz is a great tool to see what other people with similar taste listen to and it makes potential playlists for you.

HOWEVER, i can not recommend enough just downloading entire collections of artists you like or full albums instead of single songs and hitting shuffle. I have discovered so much new music for me thats been out for years by artists i love that i didnt know existed. This is what lidarr does really well in terms of the collecting music.

Symfonium is also an amazing app for using your navidrome server bar none. All the customisation and features it offer are just so much better than any streaming service app by miles and miles.

Good luck!

No problem!

We did the same thing, wrote out a small, basic set of guidelines outlining why we didnt want anything on social media or big tech clouds among a few other things.

Most family downloaded signal straight away which was a bonus to be able to possibly fuck off messenger in the future.

As long as you make it as easy as possible (within reason, dont bend over backwards if someone doesnt want to comply for no good reason) for others within your boundaries then it will end up being mostly painless.

Also congratz on becoming soon to be new parents! Sleep as much as possible now! Haha… Aha… Ha…

Something you need to consider even before all this, is what other people will do with the photos once they have them.

I’ve been through a similar situation recently and had to lay out ground rules for what people were allowed to do with the photos and where they could be saved. I made the condition that if they wanted to see photos I would only send them through signal. Past that point you just need to trust that grandma who downloads the image to her iphone doesnt have iCloud enabled by default and boom your childs image is now in the hands of apple. (Or any other auto backup cloud host)

Be prepared for some outright childish behaviour from people you thought were adults when you tell them they cant take their own photos unless they show you they dont have auto sync to iCloud enabled…

The only way to truly keep your kids image out of the cloud is to never let anyone else have possession of it to begin with unfortunately.