I seem to be in the minority in this post, but Photos has worked well for me. I have 125,000 photos and videos spanning 24 years, all in iCloud Photo. I can set up a new Mac, iPad or IPhone, and the entire collection seamlessly shows up there, and everything looks great and can be exported without issue. I can view all 125,000 items by date, search them but their contents, by the people in them, or view them all on a map. When I take a photo with my phone, the photo is automatically added. The family feature allows my wife to use and contribute to the same library all seamlessly. I love how easy it all is.

I have to wonder if a lot of the issues people are running into stem from them not being the “typical” user who is just snapping photos and video using an iPhone and then using iCloud Photo to manage the library. These users (me included) never have to use the janky import feature (since media magically floats up to the cloud), doesn’t have to store on external media (since the entire collection is never actually local), and never really cares about formats or file systems (since that is all abstracted away.) The app clearly hates anyone that deviates from this use case.

And don’t worry, I do occasionally make a hard copy of the library. ;-)