Being tethered to USB each time even if you want to copy or view 1 photo will get incredibly annoying.

Immich will also give you lots of useful features like albums, tags, filtering, face detection (local), and supports multiple devices and users (do you have enough USB ports? :p) . These small features will turn more and more useful as your library grows.

You can first keep Immich working in your local network while you figure out tailscale, flexibility is a strong suit here.