I made the mistake of turning on automatic photo back up (I have no idea how to bulk copy photos off the iphone without a mac, I've given them up as lost honestly, most of them are random crap anyway) and now my icloud account is completely full and I keep getting told I need to send Apple money.
I definitely prefer my current phone that lets me just rsync ~/Pictures.
I paid $0.99 for photosync. It syncs to many cloud providers, and (most importantly to me) to ssh/sftp.
You can set it to sync whenever your phone is inside a particular location boundary (e.g. at home, where there is wifi), so it works transparently with zero ports open to the internet, and no firewall-bypassing cloud services.
Not that I'm suggesting you should send Apple money: but it's like £0.79 per month for 50gb - less than £10/year. For me at least: that's pretty cheap compared to other services.
I definitely prefer my current phone that lets me just rsync ~/Pictures.