Help: Unable to download photos from icloud.com

Hey guys/gals!

So both my iphone (128gb) and icloud (5gb) storage are full and i wanted to download all the photos from my icloud via icloud.com onto my windows pc (in order to be transferred onto an external hard drive later on), a few days ago i had set my icloud storage to the delete everything in 30 days mode and as i had tried to move my photos and videos onto my PC via icloud.com, it did not have the download button available on my computer, nor am i able to do a drag and drop. It only allows me to "share" via email. Now i have undone the settings so it is no longer set to delete, i have rebooted both my phone and PC and also downloaded the icloud app but a) i still cannot remove my files from icloud.com and b) only my most recent photos and videos are uploaded onto the icloud app that i just downloaded.

Does anyone know what i am doing wrong? How can i get my files from icloud.com to download onto my PC?

Thanks