Storage is single-owner by design
Consumer cloud is built around one account holder. Sharing is a bolt-on: a link here, a shared album there. Nothing about it is structured around a family, and nothing about it survives the account holder. When the owner is gone, the “family” photos were never the family’s — they were one person’s, on loan.
No succession, by default
A real archive answers the question “who gets this, and how?” before it’s needed. Cloud storage doesn’t ask the question at all. The handful of legacy-contact features that exist are opt-in, rarely configured, and transfer access on the provider’s terms, not yours.
A timeline is not an archive
Photo apps optimize for the recent and the scrollable. Family history is the opposite: the wedding from 1971, the naturalization papers, the voice of a grandparent. Those need to be organized around people and relationships, found years later by someone who wasn’t there — not surfaced by an engagement algorithm.
Lock-in cuts the other way
Storage providers make it easy to put things in and quietly hard to get a complete, organized copy out — especially for someone who isn’t the account holder. An archive should do the reverse: full export, any time, by design.
What an archive actually requires
Family-shaped organization, no public exposure, one-click export, and a built-in, verified hand-off to chosen successors. Cloud storage gives you the disk. Family Bible is the archive.