iPad storage remains high despite Photos syncing to iCloud

Well, full is full--as with my garage, I have to throw stuff away, find someplace else to store stuff, or buy a new home. Since pictures only take up 20% or less of the space of full originals, you would probably need to delete well over a thousand pictures to save 1 GB.

Full storage can be very frustrating-- you actually need storage space in order to manipulate files enough to delete them, so trashing files may become problematic.

As for texts, the pictures don't get the Optimize treatment, so you can save those to Photos and delete them from the text to save 80% of their space. Still, that would take a lot of pictures.

Apps can take up space-- especially the data they have with them. I have several apps whose data take up more than a gigabyte each. And I've got tons of apps that I don't really use, and unused apps can be deleted, or offloaded. Offloading the app keeps the data on the iPad, and that's usually the big part. When you look at Settings > General > iPad Storage, you should see apps that take up lots of space.

Do you have stuff in the Files app? That can hold a bunch of data that you don't think about. You can look at using and optimizing iCloud Drive.

You can also save pictures and files to an external hard drive or thumb drive. I keep most of my pictures on an external drive and only keep my favorites on my devices. Thumb drives are slow. SSDs are fast, but expensive.

You may have misunderstood iCloud. iCloud doesn't replace or add to your local iPad's storage. iCloud Photos is a synchronization service. When you engage iCloud Photos on your iPad, then the Library on that device is kept exactly the same as the iCloud Photos Library. So, for instance, if you take a picture with your iPad, it is added to the iPad's Photos Library, copied to iCloud Photos Library, and then copied to the Photos Library on each of the other devices that you have connected. If you delete a picture on your Mac, then that picture is deleted at iCloud and on all the other devices. 

Do you use Optimize Storage? You can set this on any device, independent of the others.  If you set your iPad to "Optimize Storage," for Photos, then Photos may store only smaller images on the iPad and rely on iCloud to keep the full sized images. Having screen-sized images stored locally allows you to quickly scan through your pictures while saving lots of storage space. And, if Optimize is chosen, and you want to Edit a picture, Photos will reach out to iCloud to get a full sized image for you to work on. Your optimized Library may take up less than 20% of the space of a fully downloaded Library, depending on how much editing you do. But an optimized Library may be kept larger than that if the extra storage space is not needed.

What is your situation? How much storage do you have, and how much is free on the iPad? Do you use Optimize?