It really is useful as everything is on the MacBook. Very ordered. Easy to find things. Takes a bit of discipline though. Backup is via Carbon Copy Cloner on an automated weekly schedule to three separate SSD drives.
Discussion
I think I get it. You donāt upload your photos to a cloud service. So you do your own periodic backups to a manual raid like setup.
Yep, never upload to a third-party cloud service unless I donāt care about the photo going public. Initial transfer from camera/iphone to MacBook involves a renaming run based on exif. (Use a simple app called ExifRenamer). So basically photo files are renamed:
YYYYMMDD_hhmmss_filename.filetype
End result is:
20241225_234104_DSC_123.jpg
I sometimes also include a location in the file name like āItaly tripā.
I then file these images into specific folders named by date and general location as below and then automatically backup/duplicate periodically to SSD drives. Not raided; just three separate drives. Each containing a mirror copy. 