I think she shoots in JPG because of memory budget. A family friend talked her into buying some kind of photo management / photo touch-up application (can’t remember its name), but I think it mostly just makes her angry because it took over as the default handler for photos on her computer, and her computer is too old and slow to run the software acceptably.
How seamless is the iCloud backup when the total volume of pictures is greater than the local storage? Does the photos app smartly fetch the full photo as needed?
The iCloud photo backup work very well, in my experience. My phone and older iPad are lower capacity and have to keep optimized (smaller) photos local. The full size images are downloaded automatically when viewed in Photos.
As noted by another post, iCloud will delete a photo from the whole system if deleted on one device, so you may want periodic backups elsewhere. I just drag the entire photo library file (MacOS keeps the library, photos included, in a single “file”) from my Mac to an external drive. Can’t speak to the best way to do this from an iPad, but with the new external drive support, that might be easy?
How seamless is the iCloud backup when the total volume of pictures is greater than the local storage? Does the photos app smartly fetch the full photo as needed?