OK thanks for your thought-provoking reply, Nick. Nice to hear it explained from someone who knows the ins and outs and whys. (Although, when I used LR on desktop, the photos themselves were not copied into the catalog/container file — although I suppose you are talking about LR iOS, which I never looked into.)
What would your advice be for me, given the intentions I have outlined? Forget the dream for the moment. What approach to take that is iPad based, today, where I have a raw processor (RP!), a photo manager (Photos?), and a way forward when the iPad fills up? With the minimum of dupli-triplication other than what is unavoidable. I need to get started, but I clearly have started the wrong way. I don’t want to go too far down the wrong path.
I’m not fixated on the folder structure I outlined. Anything will do, even one big folder. (I always remember the time management expert in the late 90s, telling us all to Please Stop Making a Million Folders In Outlook and Sorting All Our Emails Into Them. Just leave them in the inbox and rely on the good search tools to find what you want. I’m cool with that. And I see Photos as analogous.) I just got really nervous when I realised Photos App doesn’t show photos I have separately loaded onto iPad — I can’t even see how to import from an iPad directory of my choice into Photos App — and I couldn’t find the Photos library in Files App, so where are my raw files if I want to move them? Then I saw the RP copy of Originals, and realised I am out of my beginner-status depth.
Would your advice be something like this: Don’t copy the camera card photos direct to my chosen directories. Instead, use Photos App to import them, then select photos in Photos App and open RP to process as per the RP manual. Anything I want to work with in Affinity or other apps, open from within Photos App. (This much I kind of already gathered from reading your article on Photos and JPEGs and raw files. If I do this, it seems to mean my original raw files will be in Photos library, not duplicates, but a full set of duplicates will be in RP’s Originals folder — correct?). I don’t mind that method, except, what do I do when the iPad fills up, and I need to move the photos to external storage and release a huge amount of space on my iPad for the next half-year-or-so of photography?
Or am I wrong and you have a better suggestion, please?
Cheers