Fwiw I don’t think pocket casts is doing that, but rather your podcasts themselves. A lot of podcasts use dynamic ad insertion that allow them to inject ads into the podcast at download time as opposed to them being baked into the episode. It lets the hosts have relevant ads in their entire backlog of episodes rather than just ones released during the campaign window.

I have a two-pronged approach. I use Google photos as is with their normal compression for searchability and casual browsing of photos, but I also have Nextcloud running on my own server where my photos are all backed up in full quality. Both uploads happen automatically so I don’t have to think about it