Iphone - Photo backing up and Icloud - arggghhhh!!!!

[Thegallofher]

I know there have been threads before but it does my head in every time I try and do this and I never seem to be able to resolve the situation. I have been into the Apple Shop - they had no answers. I have been on the Apple help site and received no answer. Sorry for the staccato nature of this post. I usually write more coherently but this is just a breakdown of my 'problem(s)'

I have an Iphone SE
I take lots of photos on my Iphone
I pay 79p a month for I-cloud storage (a recent-ish development)
My photos are automatically backed up to Icloud and can be seen when I log into my ICloud account
I have a MAC and the Photos 'app' where my partner and I save all our photos from both phones and our digital camera
Before Icloud we would back up all our photos to the MAC and back this up on an external hard drive (and then delete them off my phone)
I have over 50,000 photos on the Hardrive going back over 15 years
Now when I try and back up from my Iphone - it doesn't take everything
It randomly skips some photos
I go and check if these photos have at least saved to my Icloud and they have
So they are on my Icloud but I can't get them onto my MAC or harddrive
I want to delete photos off my phone because they are clogging up space

Questions:
I want to free up space on my Iphone so I want to delete them off my phone
Will doing so delete them off my Icloud account (scary messages seem to indicate this is the case)

Why can't my MAC take ALL my photos as they sit on my phone - why does it seem to only take a selection?

Why can't I bulk select all my photos on my Icloud and then save them onto my MAC? It seems that I have to select photos individually - I have THOUSANDS this is not practical!!

Why is this so difficult??!

I am not completely illiterate when it comes to computers and technology but this just frustrates me beyond words. My phone is frozen because it's got so many images on it. I just want to delete them off my phone knowing that I can

a) know for certain that I have them backed up on my computer/external hard drive
b) if the above is not possible, back up all my photos on Icloud to my computer/external hard drive - EASILY!

At the moment I am sitting with two computer screens open, 1 showing my Icloud account, the other showing my recent back up from my phone on my computer. I am having to identifying the images from my phone and Icloud that HAVEN'T been saved onto my hard drive (for some inexplicable reason) and then NOT delete those ones off my phone. It's taking forever and I am losing my mind!

Any help appreciated!

[BadgersPaws2]

I don't use the iCloud photo streaming either on my phone or my Mac. I just use Photos to collate all the photos from all the devices, I plug them in regularly and grab everything from them.

And that works for me without issue. I plug the thing in, it shows in Photos will all the photos, I import with the "delete after import" thing checked and the job is done.

Maybe there's some weird issue with the iCloud photo streaming. I'd turn that off for now and make sure that everything is working as it should with all photos being imported. Then I'd gradually turn the streaming back on and see what happens...

[Thegallofher]

Thanks. I think dumping ICloud is a good idea. But I can’t do that without first ensuring everything on there has definitely been backed up on my hard drive. I also realised yesterday that there are random chunks of photos that are on my phone, but not uploaded to my ICloud. In some instances it might be because we offloaded some of our holiday photos onto a memory stick (to back them up) while we were away. It might be the backed up ones that have not uploaded to the ICloud but that doesn’t make sense? It all seems a bit random.

I’ve at least deleted the most recent photos that I know have been backed up to my hard drive so the phone is functioning better.

Once I’ve laboriously checked through all my photos (and my partners - groan!) i’m Seriously considering ditching IPhone and going Android. My SE has been as slow AF recently and I know it’s because they’re deliberately making them less functional. I am going to look into a phone with a good camera and ideally one that you can plug a stick into to download images directly off the phone. Just have to investigate if such a thing exists!