Yes, exactly. I push photos into the “import folder” of Photoprism. I don’t manually trigger the re-index but I restart photoprism at night using a cronjob. I am not using settings like “PHOTOPRISM_AUTO_IMPORT”. Contact me if you need me to investigate more.
ZFS encryption works fine but AFAIK it’s complicated to do full disk encryption (for the OS drive) - this is easy to do with with luks. ZFS is not complicated and just works - at least that was my experience. There is also a lot of help available online.