I’m literally helping my wife with this as we speak. The 1000 photo at a time limit to download from iCloud is pathetic! Google’s solution is SO much better.

Side note - You mentioned Nextcloud… If you’re self hosting, take a look at Immich. It’s a self-hosted Google Photos clone with Android and iOS apps that has very active development and is insanely quick at loading large photo libraries/thumbnails (unlike Nextcloud).

Did not know this! Thanks for the tip!