Saving iphoto library to the cloud

i have backed up using the time machine but would prefer to save them to the cloud for easier access.

Backup and easy access are different purposes.

To access your photos in iCloud for browsing and sharing, set up Shared Photo Streams. You can create up to 100 Shared Photo streams in iCloud for albums of your best photos. See this link: iCloud: iCloud Photo Sharing FAQ

But Photo Streams are no backup. They will only have smaller versions of your photos, optimized for streaming. And they can not hold a full photo library. share the albums of your best photos this way and keep your Time Machine backup for a full backup.

Next year, this will change. The Photos.app for Mac on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite will let you store your complete photo library in iCloud.

Perhaps you should wait and see, before you invest too much work in organizing your photos now.

The following is from this Apple document: iCloud: iCloud storage and backup overview

What iCloud backs up

You have important information on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. iCloud automatically backs up your device over Wi-Fi every day while it’s turned on, locked, and connected to a power source. With your device information backed up in iCloud, you can easily set up a new device or restore information on one you already have.

Here’s what iCloud backs up:

• Purchase history for music, movies, TV shows, apps, and booksYour iCloud backup includes information about the content you have purchased, but not the purchased content itself. When you restore from an iCloud backup, your purchased content is automatically downloaded from the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBooks Store. Some types of content aren’t downloaded automatically in all countries, and previous purchases may be unavailable if they have been refunded or are no longer available in the store. For more information, see the Apple Support article iTunes in the Cloud availability by country. Some types of content aren’t available in all countries. For more information, see the Apple Support article Which types of items can I buy in my country?.
• Photos and videos in your Camera Roll
• Device settings
• App data
• Home screen and app organization
• iMessage, text (SMS), and MMS messages
• Ringtones
• Visual Voicemail

As you can see it's not for general backup of files from your Mac. After Yosemite comes out and when the new Photos application that will replace iPhoto is released you can check the reported cloud storage option for photos to see if that might do what you want. But until it comes out we won't know exactly what it does so we just have to wait.

One way I found out is to AirDrop your photos to an iOS device running iOS 8 and let it do the upload. Locations, time and full resolution are kept just fine -- I've tried that. Simply export your photos to a folder, open Airdrop in Finder and start transferring.

However, it might take a long time only to Airdrop everything to an iDevice, let alone upload to the cloud, given your 20,000 photos -- a huge bulk. You may want to upload what you really want to keep in the cloud right now, and wait for the solution on the Mac in 2015.

1 - that is not a backup of the iPhoto library but is simply a backup of a version of selected photos - the library contains much, much more information thant that

2 - the solution is to use a local hard drive formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) to backup to - Time Machine is a good option

3 - there currently is no known cloud backup that will work with the iPhtoo library

4 - most people do not want tens of thousands of photos on the IOS device - or can even fit them on

LN