I’m using the apps: both Drive and Photos, at least. Works very well for me. For backup, I do a physical backup daily to an attached external hard drive, and weekly to a remote cloud option

It might not solve all your needs, or your use case specifically, but I’ve got myself a Synology NAS and that has been a solid alternative to Google Photos for me.

Spot on. And as a result I have moved as much as possible away from Google myself. Email, Drive, Photos, Search etc. I’m happy