i need help with icloud

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Good afternoon.

I have a little bit confused about icloud and would really appreciate some clarifications. Sorry about the long mail but it should all make sense :-)

I have an iphone 5 and an ipad and have payed for 16GB of storage to back uo my iphone. I tried to back up my ipad but I exceeded the storage limit so I understand I would need to buy more storage to back up the ipad onto icloud otherwise it just backs up on my imac when I connect.

Recently I just upgraded by imac from 1GB to 4GB via Crucial and it was very easy to do and now my mac which is an imac early 2008 can run mavericks which I have down loaded and everything is OK. The imac is also backing uo again frpom time capsule / time machine since I upgraded to 4GB and working much better.

I wanted to load my iphotos on my imac onto icloud and have bought the latest iphoto from the app store to enable me to put my photos from the imac onto icloud.

Have gone into system preferences, selected icloud and I am not sure if the photos are now in icloud as my icloud storage since I ticked iphoto has not changed. I thought that I would need to purchase some extra storage from icloud for the iphotos to be backed up (there are around 10,000 of them)? Or when you back up from an imac does it not use any of your icloud storage? Perhaps your storage is only used when you back up from a mobile device?

When I go into manage storage / icloud via system preferences on my imac it shows Backups (my iphones are there backed up) and also below Backps it says 'mail' which I am presuming is the mail on my mac?

However nothing else is shown including iphoto, safari etc and everything else I have ticked to be backed up to icloud.

Am I doing soemthing wrong?

Also one other question on icloud, when I log into icloud a number of icons are shown mail, contacts, calendar, notes, reminders, find my iphone, pages, numbers and key notes but no an iphoto icon....actuyally this was always the case when my iphone was backed up and without my imac.....seems strange that the iphoto icon is now shown when you log into icloud? for instance if I click on contacts all of my contacts are shown so I presumed there would be an icon for iphoto and you click on that and can view you photos on icloud?

Sorry for the extremely long message and thanks anyone for ready and even more thanks for anyone with any answers :-)

Happy new year

Nick