It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.
Time Machine's job is to back up my data, it's not strictly to make a 1:1 copy of local storage. It should back up my cloud data too.
I’ve found unreasonable value in being able to search through hundreds of thousands of photos from my phone, so I went all-in on Photos.app. Though one enabling factor is that my photography workflow has drastic simplified in recent years to doing very little post (except for astrophotography, which I try and keep wip out of Photos.app anyway).
IIRC Photos.app will not even open if the default library you are pointing at is not there (i.e drive was unplugged). Are you able to just open up the library file directly and it will work as expected?
I also recall when changing Photos.app back to the HDD Library it did a ~2h 'rebuild' session before it even started downloading the new photos, but maybe thats acceptable with the 'every so often' approach.
"I actually bought a Mac Studio"... "I don't understand why Apple don't " ... wait a minute
I migrated to Linux + Pika Backup. For photos I use Ente Photos with their managed cloud storage plus a continuous export to my NAS.
Ente is surprisingly well integrated with iOS, you really don’t need to use Apple’s solution. It automatically backs up photos I take in the background.
10 minutes is great, and my changes wouldn’t seem as extensive as yours. I need to dig deeper.
I also use a modified version of this script[0] to identify everything that changed in the most recent Time Machine backup. This is hugely helpful and lets me find unimportant things that are the source of lots of unimportant changes which I can then exclude with `tmux addexclusion -p <PATH>`. For example I exclude 'node_modules' folders for anything that gets regularly updated. This removes ~10k files that would otherwise be wastefully backed up. Speeding it up is much more about reducing file count than total size.
[0] https://github.com/nlfiedler/timedog (though its woefully out of date, and I had to make some hacky patches to it to get it working)
I have hit this too many times.
I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).
For edits, I don't care too much about just baking them in since it's unlikely I'm going back to old photos and want to undo the crop.