I’m also a photographer and videographer (hobbyist, not professional) and I use unRAID for this, on a homebuilt server. It’s been a reliable solution for over 15 years now. The great thing about this option is that you can incrementally upgrade it over time as needed. The downside is you do have to do some maintenance on it from time to time.

I also backup my RAW folders and Lightroom catalogs to some external hard drives as a secondary location.

For anything I want to share online, like portfolio pieces, I just use standard cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Backblaze is good too.

I also got a lifetime subscription to Zoolz a few years back and did a big backup to their ‘cold storage’ option. Works well as an offsite archive.

Yes that’s it

Absolutely, just make sure you enable the ‘always verify’ option. When you cut/paste or move files, teracopy will make sure the files are identical (via checksum verification) before deleting them from the original location. Extremely useful.

I also disabled ‘always on top’ because I just find that annoying.

Kinda sounds like Evernote web clipper to me…

There’s also Tabcloud as a tab manager, good for closing a bunch of tabs and returning to them later.

Am I on the right track here, or is what you are proposing different from these?