how do I get all my photos into i cloud

Unfortunately, you cannot download all your photos to iCloud, it is just not made for that.

Hi, my Iphoto is a little unstable at the moment and I am nervous having all my photos only on an external hard drive - paranoid I know

That is not paranoid, but extremely sensible.

Make at least two backups of your precious photos, and store one disk off-site, at the home of a relative or your place of work. In the long run the price for an additional backup drive will be less than the monthly fee for cloud storage, and it will be faster to backup or restore your photos than cloud- access.

And an added advantage: It is easy to copy or clone your iPhoto library to a backup disk, but cloud-storage, like Drop-box or Google-Drive, cannot sync the iPhoto library properly, and you could not backup the library structure and metadata tags there, only the photos.

Regards

Léonie

iCloud is not designed for general file storeage/backup from your Mac. The most expedient backup strategy would be to get an external HD (about 2x the size of your boot drive) and use Time Machine to backup your boot drive.

OT