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.

You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple.

There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

Backups on the go. 2TB iCloud + wifi + sd card reader for iPhone.

No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups