And it's different in more ways than one. Hosting the images is just one fraction of the features that you get with Apple or some other provider. Searching, albums, sharing, are all baked in services that are still cheaper than, say, going through S3 and having a bucket with similar storage.
Apple does a pretty bad job of it then, because I have a local copy of my entire photo library too on an external hard drive. It’s quite nice really, cloud storage plus a local copy. I guess it’s somewhat of a moat because switching to some other cloud provider or my own system will be more expensive?
No I’m saying that Apple Photos literally copies to a local library automatically if you have a mac and open Photos.app. I didn’t even have to set it up. My partner did the same thing, and she’s decidedly not tech savvy. It’s one of the only reasons I ended up paying for Apple One for the 2TB cloud storage, is because of how easy they made it.
