If you want to truly save your photos, make backups of the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's house.

Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else.

If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Apple, yet I suspect that an encrypted external backup might be tied to your Apple ID, or some such, because that's how the world flies today.

Yeah, the plan would be external disk -> offsite storage.

I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it was my wife who eventually needed to use it.

To anyone who reads it: actually A HARD FISK, not a pendrive/SSD

On my iPhone, I can see the size of my iCloud photo backups. Settings -> Apple Account -> iCloud -> Storage.

Weirdly, that number is different than Immich’s estimate of my photo library (95 GB vs 150 GB), but perhaps good enough to get you in the ballpark.

Oh yes, of course. Thank you. 422 GB. Looks like my wife has slightly more.