The product photo library is one folder with three owners

The originals come from the factory's SFTP drop in Shenzhen. The approved listing images live in the S3 bucket the marketplace pulls from. The retouched ones sit on the box where you edit. Three places, and every listing update starts with remembering which is which.

hoody-files mounts backends, and it can merge them. POST /api/v1/backends/sftp for the factory, POST /api/v1/backends/s3 for the bucket, then POST /api/v1/backends/union with all three as upstreams, the factory's marked :ro so nothing you do writes back into their drop. Mount the union and it's one directory: a read looks across all three, a new file lands where the write policy points. The path the listing tool opens doesn't know which continent the bytes are on.

Nobody consolidated the assets. The filesystem did, at mount time, without moving a byte.