IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.
It’s a complete pain if you use a laptop as your daily driver. You don’t want the entire drive filled with photos, and using an external drive with Apple Photos is a PITA as the integration with iCloud doesn’t play nice if the drive isn’t reliably attached.
Apple would make a lot of lives easier if they made a tidy way of exporting images from Photos easier to automate. And while they are there, a photo file structure that wasn’t horrible, with photos names something like ‘date-time’.
Ah yea, if you are stuck using an over-priced Mac laptop as your main machine, and cannot upgrade the storage or use an external hard drive or NAS because of buggy Apple software, that would be a decent reason to keep some of your photos in an exported state instead of keeping the whole archive flat and available online at the same time. Even so, you _can_ buy a MacBook Pro with up to an 8TB drive, it just costs 2x what it should.
Though I’d pay a lot more than I did for my laptop, it’s that good. I regularly see other machines get rated and do try them out but the hardware (trackpad in particular) is never anything like as nice.
Yea absolutely. I use a Linux desktop day-to-day, and a 6 year old ThinkPad on the go, but I'm a software engineer, not a creative professional. If I were a photographer by trade, I would certainly have a MacBookPro too.
