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.