Honestly the challenge for me, as an iPhone user but not a complete Apple cloud ecosystem user, is getting the damn things off my phone. Is there anyway to do this that isn't trash yet? So many of the processes I've run through either fail randomly, or Apple has broken. At one point I remember being able to just plug into a linux box, do some mounting magic, and transfer the files over just like any USB device, but I feel like that didn't work the last time I tried.

It's downright hostile.

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse - used it literally 2 days ago to back up a couple tens of GB of photos and videos. Works great.