I actually broke down and I'm paying the exorbitant Apple tax for the extra iCloud storage for photos etc to deal with syncing between phone/mac/ipad etc.
Oh i'm paying that as well, i'm talking about backing up the photos stored in iCloud, and preferably in an automated way.
Apple's official documentation[1] simply says to login manually to icloud.com, select the photos you want to backup, and download a ZIP file. I have 3.5TB photos in iCloud...
It's enough that i can't even purchase a Mac that has the needed amount of storage, nor should it be necessary to mirror all data locally before backing it up. All i want is a way to backup my iCloud Photos locally without storing them twice (locally). It works for Documents in iCloud, and Arq handles those well, but because Photos is "special", when it stores "optimized versions" of your photos, it actually replaces your local versions with lower resolution images, so even if you backup your iCloud photo library, you still don't have all the data.
