There are some situations where online syncing services are still a crappy solution.

I'm away on holiday abroad this week, with limited roaming bandwidth and a very slow broadband connection. I'm taking photos on my waterproof camera and adding them to iCloud Photo Library via my Macbook.

I'd love to show some photos around the dinner table on my iPhone or iPad to the family members I'm away with. But I can't because Photos on the Mac is still busy uploading them to the cloud and may well not finish until I get back home to a real Internet connection.