if i back up my photos to icloud can i delete them off my iphone

I am sure you got the answer years later, but the answer is yes. I was on with a tech forever and he suggested that. You can always delete what you don't want and download to your computer after. I just organized mine and I had over 38k photos and videos. The tech said he has never been on the phone with a customer with this many pics. LOL

Never use iCloud as a storage device for photos.

You should be importing all pics taken with the iphone to your computer regularly as you would with any digital camera. This is covered in the manual.

iOS: Importing personal photos and videos from iOS devices to your computer

Once you have stored the photos on a computer, then you can delete them from the phone.

A backup should not be thought of as a storage device where you can save and extract photos to and from a device. The only good a backup is, is when your device get corrupted/dies and you perform a restore to get most everything back to the replacement or fixed device. To restore a backup, your device must be wiped completely before doing a restore of everything. You can't selectively restore specific files.

So I know this post is old but I'm trying to sync my pictures from my iPhone to my MacBook but all I can figure out is how to get them into the iCloud account. Then when I delete them from my phone they are gone off the computer. How can I do this and save them to the actual computer!! I need to free up storage on my phone!!!

Sync them to iCloud and then turn off Photos syncing.

The technology is entirely different than it was in 2012. There was no such thing as iCloud Photo Library then, so the OP was talking about iCloud backups.

Cheers,

GB