[sib]

Addressing the goal of the author vs the symptoms of Google Takeout, I've found the best way to handle a reasonably large photo library (~3TB) is to manage it locally with a DAM (digital asset management) platform and then back that up automatically and into whatever cloud(s) I want for offsite backup or sharing.

The backup process puts both the underlying photo assets plus the DAM's DB of metadata into backup automatically and continuously. I could (always) be more paranoid, but so far this has worked. And I have successfully restored from the cloud backup after a motherboard death on my primary local machine.

I think using a 3rd party cloud system as the primary system and source of truth is making life harder unnecessarily.