I decided to try to run containers locally on my machine instead of on a VM on my homelab. This way I can start to wind down the homelab box, or at least shrink it, as well as eliminate some latency when I am using my reference image storage app that I made. This is easy enough on Linux with either Docker or Podman being acceptable options.
On my Macbook I decided to try Apple's new container framework for MacOS, specifically MacOS 26. "Cutting over" to it was really easy as it is OCI compliant and allows you to use Dockerfiles:
container build --tag refboard --file Dockerfile .
container run --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:8081 --mount source=/Users/jeremyheckt/Pictures/refboard/db,target=/app/db --mount source=/Users/jeremyheckt/Pictures/refboard/images,target=/app/images refboard:latest
I think I will continue to use this as it was really easy. As well I presume it is optimized for Apple Silicon and will save me some battery life over standard Docker.