Am I expecting too much of iCloud Photo Library?

[iMore Question]

I was excited to start using iCloud Photo Library as I got the impression that it not only would offer me all my photos and vids across devices, but serve as a permanent back up. However, now that I've started moving photos off my Google Drive storage and onto Photo Share, I can tell that despite having plenty of iCloud storage (I bought plenty), my 16 GB phone is going to run out of space even just storing the optimized versions of photos. Now I'm thinking that if I delete some on my phone they will delete off iCloud too since everything is synchronized. What gives?

 

[Just_Me_D]

I don't think you're asking too much. I think we all would like iCloud Photo Library to function in the same manner as other cloud services like OneDrive and Dropbox. I'd like to be able to not only auto upload pics to it, but to login to the site and directly upload and/or download from it with little effort.