Most homelabs are born from video. You get a media server going for films and TV, wire up the arr apps to fill it, and there it sits. But the same idea, your files on your hardware instead of rented from a service, works for a lot more than movies. Photos, books, comics, audiobooks, all of it can come home.
Photos: Immich
The obvious one to reclaim. Immich has become the go-to for getting your photos off a cloud subscription and onto your own storage, with the phone backup, timeline, and search experience people expect from the big services. If you only self-host one new thing this year, plenty of people make it this.
Comics: Komga
Komga runs your comics and graphic novels, reading progress and all. If you have a pile of CBZ files that has been homeless for years, it gives them a proper home with a clean reader on top.
Books: Kavita
Kavita covers ebooks and manga, with a good reader and library management. It overlaps with Komga at the edges, and plenty of people run both, one for comics and one for books, rather than forcing everything into a single tool.
Audiobooks: Audiobookshelf
Audiobookshelf does audiobooks and podcasts, keeping your place across devices the way a paid app would, except the library is yours and nobody is going to remove a title from it.
Why bother
Each of these replaces a service that could raise its price, change its terms, or drop something from your collection without asking. Bringing the rest of your library home is the same move you already made with video, just applied to the parts most people forget they can. Once the servers are running anyway, adding one more shelf costs very little, and quietly claws back another thing you were renting.
Written while building Quartermaster, a native iOS app for self-hosted stacks.