Apple Photos is pretty convenient when you and your family live within the Apple ecosystem. By no means it's great (and some people even say that it "sucks golfballs through a garden hose" 😁), but it is convenient.
Apple seems to not being able to care less about their Photos app, as they choose to work on stupid things that nobody ever asked for, like Liquid Glass. At times one might think that they are doing good things like Shared Libraries, but they are so half-assed that I doubt anybody with a real-world use case is actually using them. Like, why on earth can I only have one shared library?
Apple Photos apps are actually pretty decent — they let you just throw photos in there and most of the time you can find things by searching with the help of their AI-driven recognition features, their automatic Memories feature sometimes surfaces up decent photos that otherwise would've been forgotten, etc.
Apple Photos services suck though! But it would be so easy to fix. Hear me out:
No distinction between Shared Albums and normal Albums. Any album should be shareable. Shared Albums should behave like normal albums — their should have all the metadata for the photos, you should be able to search across them like any other photos, you should be able to put them in other albums and so on.
Smart Albums. Have a way to automatically add photos into albums based on some search/filter criteria. For example all photos that have a certain face on them. And these albums should also be shareable.
Only one user should pay for the shared album iCloud storage space. If I create an album, and I share it with my family/friends — only I should pay for it, even if they upload their own photos in there. But they should still have convenient access to those photos — they should appear in their library, and they should seamless offload to cloud storage if they have the "Optimize Storage" setting turned on.
My use case is simple:
I want my wife to access the recent photos I took (and vice versa), without constantly asking me to send them to her. I could do that by sharing my "Recents" album with her. I don't want all of our photos to merge into a single library (because she doesn't care about the screenshots I take or any other random stuff from my library), but I want us to have access to each other's recent photos on-demand.
I want to share photos of my kids with the broader family circle (my parents, my wife's parents, etc.). I could do that with shared Smart Albums.
I want to collect photos from many devices into a single place. E.g. when our parents come to visit us, they should be able to upload their photos to my Shared Album, but still have a convenient access to them in their own libraries.
I'd also want to easily back up my photo archive to some other service, but I doubt Apple would ever make it easy :)
Surprisingly, very-very-very few photo management services would let you do this. I've researched many of them: Google Photos, Synology Photos, NextCloud, Ente, PhotoPrism, Immich, etc-etc-etc. All of them have some little annoying thing that ends up being a deal-breaker. Ente is probably the closest thing to being good, but it has really slow uploads (I guess due to the end-to-end encryption). Also, I already pay for iCloud, because I use iCloud Drive a lot — so I don't want to pay for another service, I just want have better photo management in iCloud.