Operating iCloud Photos, using a PC with iTunes to replace faulty wi-fi

Thanks for your reply, but the article "Set up and use iCloud Photos on your Windows PC" is mostly about how to get your PC photos up on iCloud, which is what I DON'T want to do!!!! The main options listed in that article (and on screen) are:

My problem is how to create space on my iPhone by offloading most of my full-sized photos from my iPhone onto iCloud, leaving behind on my phone just a collection of thumbnails, in such a way that I can click on a thumbnail and call the full-sized photo back over 4G onto my phone if I want to look at it.

I believe that is quite easy to set up over a wifi link, but my wifi is bust (one of your geniuses guessed it might be an antenna problem), so I'm trying to rely on the iTunes/PC route and my 4G link.

Any help gratefully received!

Many thanks, Chris_C1. You are on the right track, but we are not there yet! Remember that my wifi doesn't work so I'm connecting to iCloud via cable + iTunes + a PC. I've successfully backed up and sync-ed that way, and the last Sync uploaded unused apps to iCloud and marked them on my phone home screen with an iCloud symbol. My PC iCloud Photos shows 4,500 full sized photos, as it should. My phone says I've used up 32 GB of my 50 GB iCloud space, and on my PC iCloud.com agrees. On my phone I've turned on 'Optimise iPhone Storage' which is supposed to do what I want. But I still seem to have full-sized photos on my iPhone 6s, rather than small low resolution copies, so my iPhone storage load has not reduced. I have thrown out some photos, videos, etc., and could throw out more, but I'd prefer to use the 'thumbnails on phone, full size on iCloud' option. See screen capture below for my phone storage info - you can see that I have very little space left on my phone, but iCloud Photos is showing only 1%, so something isn't working! Any help gratefully received!

Firstly, thanks to Leanne_68 for the above response, and my apologies for being out of touch for so long. I've now begun to grapple with this problem again.

a) Part of the hassle is that when I run the PC iTunes, it can hang for 5-10 mins while it finds and displays music stuff that is irrelevant to my issue. However, eventually the symbol for my iPhone appears, and I can open the iPhone page that looks like this:

It also does its 'Sync' routine in the 'Apple' space at the top of the screen. Yesterday it spontaneously embarked on several hours of backup file downloads, but it was only today, when I clicked on 'Back Up Now' on the above screen that it finished off its backup and updated the date in 'Latest Backups' - and told me that it had backed up onto my PC, NOT iCloud, as expected, and as requested on the page displayed above!

Meanwhile, back on my phone, I'm still at the limit of my storage, and there is no sign of the full-size photos on the phone being replaced by thumbnails, and Settings still says: 'iPhone Not Backed Up'!!! "iCloud Backup" is turned on.

Any suggestions welcome!

Thanks Grace

Using my phone to look up storage on iCloud shows several GBs of iCloud Drive and Photos, as expected, but Backup = 0KB. It also says 'iPhone Not Backed Up', and 'Backup Settings' shows iCloud Backup turned on. So my phone doesn't know about the backup onto my PC (see below re. wi-fi route).

Looking up the iPhone page on iTunes that I sent you above, it confirms that 'Your iPhone has never been backed up to iCloud', but that it has been backed up to my PC.

The problem with the Wi-Fi network option is discussed at the start of this thread. Part of my problem is that my phone has a hardware fault (one of the Apple 'geniusses' suggested it was probably the antenna) so I can't use wi-fi, and that is why I am trying to use the iTunes route for syncing and back-up. But as my screen-dump above shows, even though I set iTunes to backup to iCloud, it seems to have backed up to my PC instead.

The original problem I started out with was that I wanted to use the option to store full-sized images on iCloud and thumbnails on my phone (because I'm running out of space) but that doesn't seem to be working over iTunes either!

So my problems are:

In the absence of a working wi-fi link, and using a cable link to iTunes on a PC instead:

a) How to get it to backup to iCloud rather than my PC

b) How to get it to replace photos on my phone with thumbnails, keeping the full-sized photos on iCloud.

Any thoughts welcome! Or do I need another genius appointment?!!

Many thanks for your interest.

Sorry - screen capture seems to have vanished. Here it is:

Sorry - screen capture seems to have vanished again - here it is:

Just to add another small symptom, see attached. My phone thinks that iCloud Photos is only taking up 1% of my iCloud when in fact it takes up a couple of GB or more.

By the way, do you know where iTunes stores the backup on my PC? Then I could check up that it is indeed there!