How do I prevent my photos/videos from being downloaded locally?

I've finally given in and bought 2tb of storage on iCloud so I could access my photos across all my devices while not having to store those images locally. I assumed Photos on my mac would simply act as a way to view my images stored in iCloud. But Photos seems to want to download all my images locally.

Up until now I always managed my photos and videos by manually transferring them to my computer using Image Capture and then loading them into Adobe Lightroom. I bought the iCloud storage so I could use the Photos app while also avoiding using local storage to keep my images.

However when I just switched on iCloud photos on my Mac it said it was downloading my images.

Is there a way to use iCloud Photos on my Mac without downloading the images locally?

I am going to be using Photos across 3 different macs - so I definitely do not want to have my Photos Library stored locally on each machine.