I’m a little nervous (yes I have backups, but still…) since using Photos, I’ve seen Photos going through my entire library of 66,000 photos and re-evaluating all of them and re-uploading all of them at least 3 times since Photos has become available.  I always had the setting to store my ‘original’ photos on my Mac (via external TB2 drive) but having it go through my entire library multiple times like this makes me concerned.  For example, I’ve used iTunes since inception with over 11,000 songs and I’ve seen how iTunes has messed up my library, especially iTunes 12.2… it messed up my AIFF high-bitrate songs by replacing them with Apple’s versions of low-bitrate songs.   

I’m thinking of pulling my origins back out of Photos and use a different photo management system.  I just don’t trust this new cloud system as much anymore.

How can I filter out the originals I have in iCloud Photo Library and ensure I am not extracting the lower quality versions of my photos that were used in my devices?