Syncing iphone photos and Mac photos

iCloud Photos is convenient once it is up and running, but the initial upload is very slow, so I would bear with it.

If you go into the 'Photos' view which is at the top of the sidebar and then go across to your photos and scroll to the bottom you should see a status bar, like below.

Another way to check on progress is to log onto www.icloud.com

Regarding your older precious photos, unfortunately you are not able to pick and choose which photos to sync. One idea though is to simply create another library on your mac and copy all of those photos in to it and remove them from your main library. I have a couple of these archive libraries. If you hold down Alt when you open Photos you can then select which library you want to open.

Obviously make sure you have plenty of backups of both libraries.

Thanks

Russ

Assuming that you are logged into the same Apple account on both your phone and Mac, then iCloud Photos will indeed create a single merged library containing all of the photos from both your Mac and iPhone which you'll be able to view on both devices. 200gb is a quite a large library so just leave it to do its thing and your patience will be rewarded. Part of the reason it takes so long is that iCloud will also de-duplicate photos across both devices.

Given you will now a have a large, single library make sure you have taken all necessary precautions re backing up your library - there are quite a few discussions here on the topic, a recent one was quite detailed. Remember iCloud is a syncing service, not a backup service.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also throttles the bandwidth when a large library is being uploaded, as once everything is uploaded and sync'd, new photos and edits show on other devices almost instantly.

Just to double check - you do have enough I cloud storage, don't you?

Good point Tony!