I really don't need the cloud and would be fine with AirDrop, I just want the whole thing to be automatic. I take photos during the day, and when I get home, I just want to go through them on my mac. Having to manually select 50 photos (trying to keep in mind which ones I've already transferred over), then sending them to myself over airdrop, waiting for the transfer to complete, then importing them into Photos, then deleting the originals, is tedious especially if I want to do it every single day. Would be great if this just happened in the background without asking me. My Photo Stream did exactly this. iCloud Photos is overkill for my needs and would force me to upgrade to a more expensive tier because I have a huge library (which only grows). But there is no other automatic solution.