Lots of people talking about photo retention policies here, but for me the issue is videos. We have little kids, and that means lots of cute videos. It's harder to scan through them and see what's useful versus what isn't. I try to remember to delete videos that didn't turn out when I take them, but that doesn't help with the videos that I shoot that are 2 mins long but only have 20 seconds of something worth keeping.
So far I've been able to get by with retail HDDs; I have a 5TB drive at home and another that we keep off-site and refresh a couple times a year. This seems to be a sustainable strategy for me, as affordable (~$100) portable HDDs are growing at a rate that is faster than my storage needs. I don't know if it would be cheaper to pay for iCloud, but for whatever reason I feel safer having two HDDs with my media than trusting Apple's (or anyone else's) cloud.
> I don't know if it would be cheaper to pay for iCloud, but for whatever reason I feel safer having two HDDs with my media than trusting Apple's (or anyone else's) cloud.
I'd suggest paying for iCloud just for the ability to automagically backup your iPhone(s). You can exclude Photos from being backed up if you prefer.
I use iCloud Photo Library as well on a larger plan, but the backup feature alone is definitely well worth $0.99.
I can't imagine AI would be able to tell what constitutes the cute part of a video of a little kid, but it would sure be nice if I could just tell Siri to "delete all but the last 20 seconds of this video". It's not that manually cropping is that many steps, it's that on an iPhone, it's hard to get the crop tool to work reliably (or my fingers are just really fat).
So far I've been able to get by with retail HDDs; I have a 5TB drive at home and another that we keep off-site and refresh a couple times a year. This seems to be a sustainable strategy for me, as affordable (~$100) portable HDDs are growing at a rate that is faster than my storage needs. I don't know if it would be cheaper to pay for iCloud, but for whatever reason I feel safer having two HDDs with my media than trusting Apple's (or anyone else's) cloud.