Tools like Google Photo bring a lot that it is not easy to waive them in favor of privacy. Now the question is if people still think about privacy when using tools? Or do they choose a local alternative if it was an option? Why or why not?
3. Get the hard copy and put it in beautifully crafted albums
4. OneDrive/Dropbox/GooglePhoto/iCloud/Flickr for anything
which isn't personal with still my privacy settings ON. I treat them the way I treat images downloaded from Internet.
PS:
Assuming that those are your personal photos as you are concerned about privacy and you describe yourself as a data scientist.
I want my photos local, under my control. I don't have an issue with using the cloud to ease distribution of my photos to all the devices on which I want to view them, but I want a local repository having all my photos - which I will also keep backed up. FWIW, I feel the same way about music, too.
My question is whether it matters to the public or not. It seems it is not a big concern for most of people. And it is not about cloud as general. It is about photo storage because the nature of it: people use multiple devices to take shots.
Files I casually pick up on the net go into my GPics album. Let google have the here comes dat boi harambe memes.
My family pics land on the local NAS drive, where they are stored and kept for safekeeping (though I'm considering to backup to B2B)
Of course, some photos require much more aggressive defences, in my case I use LUKS with a simple LVM-RAID1 and a 30+ character password.
I don't want everything available on the net, I want that to be available for which I don't care enough to give a singular fudge.