> But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot

Fully agreed there. It would be nice to have some real widely used standards in this space. I'd love to just have a single API available to query any of my datasets wherever they may be. When I open a picture picker I should see files from my NAS, from Google Photos, from my local device, from any remote device I can access at the moment, from a NextCloud instance, etc.