> or switch to another provider
Can you though? Its been a few years since I've been on apple, but being able to get anything but icloud native support in other apps was basically non-existent. Compared to android where it gives you a plethora of choice out of the box.
Yes - they're already on my computer, so any full-disk backup service will back them up by default. There's an option to purge them from disk and download from iCloud on demand, but you don't need to use it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111762
ah fair, I was thinking on the iphone, but in fairness this is a thread about a laptop
Even on an iPhone you can back up your library to Google Photos or other services. You just can’t do so directly through Apple’s Photos app.
It's different on mobile (iOS/Android) where individual apps need special support for cloud providers. On a mac everything is just a file for most apps, so all the cloud providers work by default.