Transferring icloud photos

• & I’ve done this - iPhone or iPad: Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos> move iCloud Photos slider to on/green. Photos will download.

Well, I thought I had, endless spinny ⚙️& ‘updating’

So, I'm trying to delete from icloud, and I get 'These items will be removed from this album, but will remain in your photo library'. which means I have to trawl through all my devices, looking for the same items to delete from each? Are there people at apple just enjoying pushing people over the edge???........

'Deleting the photo on iCloud.com does not delete it from the device because the photo originates from the device so a copy will be left behind and added to the "recently deleted" album for 30 days' -

I have nothing in my recently deleted folder??? You will be glad to know I have officially given up. Thanks again.

The pain continues - I'm busy deleting tonnes of photos from icloud to free up space happily being reminded every 3 seconds that deleting from icloud will delete from ALL my devices. Fantastic I say! How convenient! It's doing something useful for once.! At no point was there ANY mention that this will ONLY happen if icloud photos is switched on, on ALL my devices. As mentioned above, I have tried to turn this on, on my ipad and it just says 'updating'. I've tried to do this on my mac, I select to turn icloud photos on, enter password, and it immediately de-selects 'turn icloud photos on'. It gets better. I am then told that I have exceeded my storage space (I KNOW, I KNOW) and I have to PAY to upgrade the storage space which I am trying to REDUCE. I had naive notions of all the things I could do with a mac in creative terms which has never materialised because of the all the very basic, fundamental processes I can't complete which means posting here tearing my hair out trying to work it out. All help gratefully appreciated. Once, again. & also, if I spend hours deleting from icloud on my pad, then it would seem I will have to do the same on EVERY SINGLE device so therefore the 'THIS WILL DELETE FROM ALL DEVICES' is complete and utter rubbish?