Is there a local Mac cloud capability available?

Photos is not designed to work with a home cloud. The only cloud it supports is iCloud.

If you store photos loose in the filesystem, it would certainly be possible to set up a Mac mini as a file server for your other Macs. But you'd need to access them with applications other than Photos.

I do not know, offhand, what third-party photo organizers would work with this sort of arrangement. I suspect that Lightroom Classic would not. Maybe either

• Programs like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo V2, and Bridge that don't really try to keep photos organized in a database; or
• Something like Mylio (which supposedly can store your pictures in several clouds, or on local devices)

Mick_M wrote:

I took a look at Mylio just now - the website looks pretty spiffy, but it's still a subscription service which is something I'm trying to avoid.

In order to even view their pricing you need to provide contact info beforehand, and they curiously provide demos but you have to make a booking with them to experience it. It all looks a worm on a hook with a nice shiny lure looking to catch me. Not the kind of "sales" experience I'm comfortable with...

"If you have to ask, you can't afford it." ?!?

This review (and the pricing page to which it links) indicate that a subscription is $12.99 per month or $119.99 per year, if you store your full-size photos on your local devices and do not rent any "Mylio SecureCloud" storage (on Backblaze servers).

SilentPeakPhoto – Mylio Photos Review – Cloudless Photo Management (February 13, 2025)

ID imager PhotoSupreme doesn't really care where your photos are - and you can package up server copies on a machine for travelling if you're working on the move. However, it's more of a cataloguing database than an editor and I don't think its editing and processing tools will be anywhere near as good as some of the other tools quoted. It's a one-off payment although I think that if you want to use AI there's a subscription to whichever AI you use. One advantage is that you can save all the category data in the images' meta-data so you're not relying on a non-portable database for much of your hard work and you can search the images for your catalogue data in most file systems. The dev is very helpful and will turn round support queries in a couple of days.

Full disclosure - I don't do much editing of my photos and I don't use AI. I'm not affiliated with ID Imager

I've not explored Peakto

https://cyme.io/products/peakto

apart from some reading about it. It's available on subscription or outright purchase, but I suspect that their pricing structure might be a bit stiff, at €270 for a stand alone licence. But it does check your boxes. However for that money you could have a subscription to Adobe's Lightroom more than two times over...

I think you'll struggle to find an alternative to to Mylio that's not subscription, or that has its particular strengths. Let us know if you do.

Mick_M wrote:

Is there a way that I can set up that Mac mini as an independent local cloud that would only be only used for the Photos app on our Macs while keeping the regular iCloud account for everything else?

No. It's all or nothing.

There are many local share/sync products available. You could use these services for any kind of data. But it wouldn't be iCloud. You could definitely use such a service to store photos, but not for Photos (note the change in capitalization!).

But really, as far as that goes, if you have a Mac mini that you want to dedicate as such, just turn on file sharing. Presto! There you go. Just don't try to get fancy. It's a file server. You can use it as a file server. But you can't integrate it with iCloud. You can't store iCloud data on it. It's something else entirely.

Mick_M wrote:

Sorry for the delay. I was looking to have all the connected machines behave like using iCloud but using my own local cloud and not having to pay anything (e.g. ~$130/year for Apple's 2TB plan). It sounds like I could set up file sharing, but then I'd lose all the functionality of the Photos app. Looks like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place (which I suspect is exactly how Apple want it).

Well if someone asked you to spend about $10 million to build and support a system so that maybe 0.2% of your customers could save $130, would you do it?

Looks like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place (which I suspect is exactly how Apple want it).

Why? What have Apple got against you personally? It's just another possibility but maybe they simply make a system that works for a lot of people in a lot of cases, and for anyone else they can either roll their own solution or access a third party one. You have alternatives, you're not locked into anything.

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing Mylio would be good at.