I think the point of the original question is who he could use instead of Costco which gave him good prints at a good price. There is a big difference between a pro selling his prints and a person doing personal printing. I softproofed my images with the ICC info for Costco printers and paper from a calibrated monitor. The prints i got from them were as good as what i got from pro printers at 4x the cost plus shipping. I too am looking for a replacement and have sent a number of images out to multiple printing companies. Burk gave him a number of printers to look at.

it is always nice to say what version of iMac you have, the ram, the storage and the current macOs to ask questions like this.

second yay for Affinity Photo. I use them for all my stacking - HDR, Focus, even the few times I have tried Astro. I just did a comparison on a 5 panel HDR Pano stack with them versus Lightroom Classic and Photoshop , Luminar HDR and On1. Affinity was superior and really the best value of the bunch.

go to Backblaze.com and look at their quarterly drive stats. They use thousands of drives and most are SSD. I personally use the SamSung SSD, wouldn’t touch as Western Digital SSD or hard drive (not including they own SanDisk and Toshiba which so far they haven’t screwed up.

I don’t feel like there were any significant new features in v2 so your old v1 workbook should work fine.

best advice - but I will add that if you had a professional take the original image he probably still owns the rights to it.

Great products and even though I use peak design straps I prefer Cotton Carrier products for securing my camera to my chest while hiking

or look at On1 resize AI which is as good or better than Topaz Gigapixel. I have both and On1 does a better job about 75% of the time. And way faster

the only issues you will run into is not around Ventura but rather that there are some features especially in Photoshop that do not work on the apple silicon version. To get them you have to find the app in your applications folder, right click on the Photoshop app, select get information, check the run with Rosetta version and now you get all the features but it runs slower..

It has a few nice upgrades thought one is good for me. You can set the size of the text to small, medium and large. I have to use glasses to read my 32 inch screens so this is a pretty nice feature. It is also a bit faster on my M1 Mac Mini though the thumbnails are still slow to build and going to development for the first image is a bit slow. After that however it runs very fast.

Backblaze.com is who I use for cloud backup. They issue a report every quarter on their failure rates on thousands of hard drives rather than antidotal comments on a single drive. Western Digital is usually the loser but even its failure is still quite low.

Toshiba is the highest rated usually with Seagate just behind them.

SSD drives are generally more reliable but much higher costs. Using a 1-2-3 workflow for backup works best. I am on a M1 Mac Mini where I backup with an external Seagate HD with Time Machine. I also do a complete backup using CCC to another Seagate HD. Then I backup to the cloud with BackBlaze. I live in an area where we have evacuated 4 times in the last 10 years. 3 of those times I was not there to grab the backup drives so the cloud backup really made me less anxious. Fortunately the fires never got to our house (50 ft away).

I use SSD for my working catalogs and archive to an external 8TB Seagate External drive as my data drive.

where are you finding a Pro 200 for $200?

I believe you will find that the epson scanner comes with the basic silverfish application. I tested it against vuescan and found it to be easier to use..

if you want to risk Epson the ET +7750 is on sale at Best Buy - https://www.bestbuy.com/site/epson-ecotank-photo-et-8550-all-in-one-wide-format-supertank-printer/6469372.p?skuId=6469372

After having a number of Epson printers dies just after the warranty ended I will never buy them again. Canon has been great for me..

Unfortunately the price of the Canon replacements are more than $500 plus they come with starter ink so you will buying ink soon at a huge cost. Canon does have an ink tank printer but it only has 4 colors. I want an ink tank printer with pro colors! Until then I will send my prints out.