The Apple ecosystem welcomes you with open arms.

I store every photo and video I’ve ever taken [hundreds of GBs, first photos are from my teens in high school circa 1997] in Apple Photos; highly recommend it. Yes, you pay a bit for the storage. Yes, it’s a closed ecosystem. Yes, I also backup my originals to Backblaze. But deprecation, ever, is highly unlikely while the UX is top notch. More good things coming for photos in iOS 13!

How does the Apple Ecosystem allow me to backup photos from iCloud photo storage to my Synology NAS?

Because Drive integration for Photos allowed me to do exactly that. Last I checked iCloud will lock down all my photos onto a platform that's not even accessible on Linux.

My solution to that very problem is to just use a third party app to sync to my NAS. I can't use Time Machine since my Macbook Pro doesn't have my full library downloaded to it (when will Apple ever start with 512 GB SSDs in their laptops...).

I have iCloud Photos and pay for it, but I want to make sure I have a local backup too so I use NextCloud to sync to my NAS (which is running a NextCloud instance). You could also use the Plex app, or there's things like Resilio Sync that can auto-upload photos.

I'm not aware of an open source solution for auto-upload other than NextCloud (and possibly OwnCloud, but I don't use it), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was one somewhere or an app that did auto-backup to SMB/CIFS/WevDAV/whatever

Yeah, I guess I'll switch to Synology Moments, but it's still significantly more hassle than using the nice Google Photos app and having a rather hassle free local backup.

Time Machine. My Synology NAS backs up (including Time Machine data for all of our family MacOS devices stored on the NAS) to Backblaze B2.

“Lock down” is hyperbole. You can mount Apple filesystems (including the one storing your photo library) from a Linux workstation or server over the network.

I admit that if you’re looking for an open API for photo management, iCloud is not for you. But it works for most people.

How does a photo storing system where I can't share pictures with my Android owning grandmother "work for most people"? Are my family members who didn't give out money to Apple good enough to share my life experiences with?

https://www.chriswrites.com/share-icloud-photos-non-apple-de... (How to Share your iCloud Photos with non-Apple Devices)

I share my Apple Photo albums with android users without issue. I hope this was helpful despite your snark. I’m just trying to help.

Or if you'd prefer to host your own media, SyncThing!

https://syncthing.net/

Not as good as Apple Photos unfortunately (for photos and video), and I say this as a proponent of SyncThing [1]. On device facial recognition, album sharing and syncing, etc.

Most people’s time is worth paying for something that just works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160755

I used syncthing for a while but I found it was murdering my CPU. Didn't bother trying to solve that problem - just uninstalled it since the value it was providing me was less than any troubleshooting effort would have been.

I second this. Syncthing has gotten to the point where it just works, and if it doesn't ever just work (once/twice a month if that), a restart of the syncthing service clears it all up.

I have my own self-hosted system for archiving photos. It's not as fancy, and smooth as iCloud, but it works with my 28+ megapixel cameras and their massive raw files.

Occasionally a drive will fail and need to be replaced, or a photo will disappear or be corrupted by gnomes, but I don't mind tinkering with it.

My wife, on the other hand, is an iCloud devotee, and has almost 200GB of photos backed up to iCloud. Pretty much every photo she's taken on every one of her iDevices since the iPhone launched. It has never lost a photo. It automatically tags everything. It automatically syncs to her computer and iPad. She can access it from anywhere.

If there was a sane way for me to import and manage 30TB of raw photos in iPhoto, I might follow her lead.

I use Google Photos because I can't share iCloud photo albums with non-Apple users. The same is true for many other Apple services.