[cdown]

If you really want to store a "lifetime of photos", you should probably consider having a better long-term backup strategy than just putting it in locations that are managed by a single piece of software. :-)

Sure, some of these applications store a copy both online and on disk, but if your application chooses to run amok and delete everything, that's not really going to matter in many cases. I've seen horrifying things happen when iPhoto tries to sync with the cloud before. :-(