I only ever open YouTube links in the Brave browser, and I only use the brave browser for YouTube. No ads by default, even when signed in; speaks for itself. For all the people here who hate on Brave; only use it for YouTube. Its the best solution on Apple that I have found.

iCloud Drive is the best integrated, smoothest way to go for cloud storage. But you’re gonna pay, and Apple knows exactly how to price it so it always seems like the next tier is worth it, even though all of them are overpriced. I pay around $40 a month after taxes for Apple One because it’s the most cost effective option that gets me AppleTV+, Apple Music+, and 2TB of iCloud+. I don’t need 2TB of storage, I need 500GB; But that’s not a fuckin option. It goes from 200GB for $2.99 to 2TB for $9.99 with nothing in between. Apple TV+ on its own is $9.99 a month. Apple Music individual plan is $10.99 a month…but you can only stream on 1 device at a time, and they WILL give you constant annoying pop-ups and stop your music if you try to stream on more than one or if they mistakenly think you are streaming on more than one, which happened to me constantly, and fucking Senior Tier AppleCare support could NOT figure it out OR solve it. So I pay the extra 6 bucks a month for Apple One Family or whatever, which lets me stream on 6 devices simultaneously. I don’t ever DO that, but it magically stops that error that no one could solve. You also get Apple Arcade+, Apple News+, and Apple Fitness+, and I don’t use any of that shit.

The above also solves for your photo storage inquiry, which is also what I do.

Extensions I use for Safari are AdGuard, Wipr, Extract, Vinegar, Consent-o-Matic, Hush, and superagent. I use Kagi for search. Yes I pay for that.

Brace yourself. You’re going to get a lot of really mean and hateful comments in this community asking about Apple, so fair warning.