I'm going through the process of switching off of Gmail and onto a Fastmail account under my own domain. I'm loving the freedom of having my own domain that I can switch to another email provider whenever I want. Also, Fastmail with a custom domain has some nice features that were unavailable with a Gmail account (aliases, masked emails, automatically snoozing certain emails so I get a bunch all at once, etc.)
As for pictures, I do use Google Photos, but it's not my primary photo video store. It's more for the app that lets me lookup pictures.
For storing original versions of pictures/videos, I sync from my phone to a home computer using Syncthing, and store backups of my files on AWS S3 using Restic for encrypted backups.
If I lose Google Photos, no big deal. I still have local and cloud copies of my data.
