Apple was not able to narrow the scope of a UK lawsuit accusing it of locking 40 million UK consumers into iCloud, to the detriment of third-party cloud storage providers. British consumer group Which? first filed the lawsuit in late 2024, and is asking for £3 billion for UK Apple customers. Apple wanted to exclude non-paying iCloud users from the lawsuit, but the tribunal denied Apple's request in a 2 to 1 majority.
FYI you can access and download iCloud photos on a computer, which might help your wife transfer them without using her phone.
Yeah, she’s in the process of doing that now, but it’s a whole massive arsehole that they baked into the process from the start; either intentionally or not.
And that doesn’t get around the fact that if you use the default camera app, which most people will, there’s no way to save the photos to anywhere other than the camera roll. And you can’t integrate the way photos work with iCloud into something like Immich. As far as I’m aware.
Möbius Sync can sync photos via SyncThing, but the photo support is currently in early beta. So results may work perfectly, or maybe not at all. Möbius is also what I use to automatically sync my Obsidian vaults, since Obsidian locks cloud vaults behind their subscription model. I just sync all my devices to my NAS (and to each other) via SyncThing.