Can someone explain the day-to-day life of using Immich?

Hi!

I have read a lot about Immich and it seems like a very cool project I'd like to try out but since it's the first thing I'd self host... I am curious about the quality of life aspect of it all.

For example, I have read up on different ways to access Immich when you're outside of your home (VPN, reverse proxy, tailscale, cloudflare tunnel (?), etc.)

but I haven't found much about what it actually means in terms of practical usage.

Say that I'm out and about and I want to show a friend a photo from my Immich library. Do I need to start VPN on my phone and then open Immich? Do I have VPN constantly running so that all my traffic is going through the VPN?

Say that I'm taking photos while not on VPN - do I have to turn on the VPN in order to back these up or do I (as in the previous step) use VPN consistently? Or do you wait until you get home with backing them up?

I have a company phone only (which I am allowed to use privately) so not sure if I could really leave it connected to VPN 24/7 just for the immich use case so I am curious if you could explain how you have set it up and how it affects your day-to-day usage?