Now what? Is that a crime or something? Fuck off man

Sure! There’re actually a couple of things I like:

• It’s actually one of the few apps that still work like a traditional photo management app: It works on the base of a file-based library that has synchronization added on top. This enables me to freely move my library around, easily create backups of it or even reverse-engineer it. I’m aware there are brilliant foss apps like DigiKam (KDE/Linux) but they lack other aspects like synchronization and are not as tightly integrated.
• I’m still able to be somewhat independent on Apple: Since the library is file-based and I can extract my images using either my own tool or one of the tools available on GitHub, I can easily migrate away from apple should they start doing fishy things.
• Privacy-wise Apple seems to be one of the better options: Metadata like face recognition are computed locally on-device. I know there are more privacy oriented options like Ente, but their feature-set is not quite as mature as I need it.
• I just really like the apps: They’re well-integrated, easy to use and I like the editing capabilities. I also like the way they handle edited photos etc.

Organization-wise there’s nothing special. The only thing I do is to organize my images into albums.

To sum it up: It’s highly subjective but for my workflow it’s a good mix of autonomy and still good user experience.

I use a self-written tool to extract my images and videos from Apple Photos and back them up incrementally as files and directories using Borg Backup.

Using this approach I retain full ownership over my data without having to look for alternatives to Apple Photos, which I really enjoy using.

As a result, I have a “live” copy on my iPhone/Mac/iCloud, a backup on my NAS and a remote Borg Backup repository in a data center.