iPhoto sync without icloud upload

Sorry if my title is a little strange. Im not sure how to put this out there without describing my issue. Its been years since I started keeping track of my photos, and im pretty sure something changed or im missing the correct way to set this up. I used to be able to take a photo from my iPhone and it would go out to all my devices into iPhoto. Now it seems that I have to upload to iCloud before it will fly out to other devices, which in turn eats up my iCloud storage. I've never had pictures in my iCloud storage but would show up on all my devices automatically. What setting am I missing? Or is this not possible anymore? I thought maybe because I now backup my iPhone to iCloud instead of my MacBook that it wants to upload my photos to iCloud and not just sync over to my MacBook. Ive read that I could backup to my MacBook instead of iCloud and then sync my photos over then, but I never had to do it that way before.