| Everything goes in iCloud Photo Library so it's always available to me on my phone or computer. There's about 2 TB of photos. It gets backed up to my Synology NAS via icloudpd in docker, and then uploaded to Amazon Glacier (3-2-1 backup) For photos of our kids, we have an iCloud shared album that is shared with family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, etc) so that becomes the curation of all the photos of the kids. Not ideal since it's in lower resolution. Every year for the kids birthdays I make a collage of their highlights of the past year and print it in A2 as birthday banner and these make for nice memories. For memorable trips after the trip I go through and create an album and put it in an album. I like looking back at these when I'm feeling nostalgic or anxious about my place in life. For stuff I like to refer to like hobby projects, stuff around the apartment (device setup/model numbers/wiring etc) etc I create albums and sort them in folders. When I need to find a photo, if it's not in an album 80% of the time I find it through the geotagged world map feature. "that campsite that weekend was over here somewhere, oh there's that photo of the nice stream we bathed in". The other 20% is mostly through text search (Photos does OCR on all your photos) or date. I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired... |
The ability to search the photo library has been steadily improving (in my experience, Google still has an edge over Apple in this area) and with the advent of new AI technology I only expect it to get better. Except for special occasions I don't even attempt to "organize" or "tag" my photos. It reminds me of how Google Search surpassed early 'library catalog' style indexes like Yahoo.
The biggest downside of iCloud is the lack of an API to access the data programmatically for backups etc. I've experimented with `icloudpd` and it worked OK, but I'm not sure about the long-term stability as it's basically just "screen scraping" iCloud.com to download the photos from the web which is not officially supported by Apple and is sensitive to any changes to the website as well as the (remote?) possibility of getting your account banned. The performance is also bad as it has to download all photos even the ones that are already stored locally.
There’s also `osxphotos` (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) which works by reverse engineering the undocumented sqlite database in the photos library that Apple uses for storing the photos metadata. This avoids the performance problems of accessing the library through iCloud.com like `icloudp` does and enables many more features like searching by faces, places, etc. and they have an export function with a ton of options to backup your library.
Finally, I have a side-project working on a simple set-it-and-forget Mac app for backing up your entire photo library (including iCloud Photos) to a local disk, network share, NAS, etc. Unlike the above options, it uses the official Apple PhotoKit library to access the photos and doesn’t require setting up a Python environment, running command-line tools, etc. If you’re interested check it out here: https://www.ibeni.net