Surprisingly, I've received a similar storage notice from Apple before the holidays and I decided to download all photos/videos into my own media server instead of hosting it on iCloud.
There is not an easy, straight-forward way to download your archive from iCloud. I am slowly getting there using multiple machines and devices.
The issue with the recent changes with Apple is that they increase the prices for no good reason. We're always going to take photos/videos and their sizes keep increasing with modern tech and capabilities.
There is an easy way to get your Data. It's just kind of hidden.
It's works the same way as Google Takeout. To get to it do this:
Sign in to your Apple ID account page at appleid.apple.com on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or PC.
Go to “Data & Privacy” and select “Manage Your Data and Privacy.”
On the following page, go to “Get a copy of your data” and select “Get started.”
> There is not an easy, straight-forward way to download your archive from iCloud.
I use PhotoSync[0] to copy photos from my iPhone to a NAS. It's an excellent program.
It will even download photos from iCloud as needed and can do format conversions. I run it every few days to push new photos to my NAS so that I've always got a local copy (these also get backed up to Backblaze B2 nightly). The format conversion lets me keep HEIC+JPG pairs of my photos, so I have the original and something that's more readily usable.
What I really want is something that will do the same thing, but with iCloud Drive. I keep a bunch of stuff in there and it bothers me that I don't have a reasonable way to back it up. Apple's recommended methods[1] leave a lot to be desired.
Photos app for offline storage is also woefully neglected by Apple. They don't really design it for use with an external drive (you are expected to locate your library on a internal storage or permanently attached storage). The reason is that the photo library constantly gets corrupted on external drives, forcing a long rebuild/repair process.
Often the photos app doesn't even detect the iphone even when plugged in, and it's a serious bug that Apple has neglected for years.
Everything Apple does seems to be designed to drive hardware sales. Why support external drives, when you can be up-sold for larger internal storage (at a huge markup)? The "Photo Library" could simply be a database file with references to photo locations, alas that might confuse Mac/iOS user with "files" vs "photos".
> What about the Photos app on MacOS if you have one?
If you ever try a large-scale import/export into macOS Photos be prepared for 100% CPU, endless spinner cursors and the process ending up killed because it ran out of memory.
The issue with the recent changes with Apple is that they increase the prices for no good reason. We're always going to take photos/videos and their sizes keep increasing with modern tech and capabilities.