I also just do this. However I have already found 2 photos that got randomly corrupted, and I don't know how to prevent that.
If you are fine with changing your file system, check out zfs. It stores checksums with your data, and can, if configured to store multiple copies, repair corruption.
Maybe check out nix. It can be installed on any distro and if you install (temporarily but cached) the app trough nix shell you can then just clean the dependencies with nix store gc.