I shoot RAW but I wouldn't want to eat up all my iCloud space with my RAW files. They're 80MB each off of my Fujifilm camera. I store them on a local DAS instead. Curious what the real use case is for storing RAW on iPhoto.
There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:
No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups