If I upload my entire Photo Library to iCloud Drive, then delete photos from my Library (on my computer), can I still access those deleted photos on my iCloud Drive?
Basically, my Photo Library is taking up too much space on my computer so I'm trying to alleviate some of that space without buying an external hard drive immediately.
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), iCloud Drive
If I upload my entire Photo Library to iCloud Drive, then delete photos from my Library (on my computer), can I still access those deleted photos on my iCloud Drive?
An iPhoto library will not work properly on iCloud Drive. It will be corrupted by the syncing. An iPhoto Library needs to be on a locally connected volume or on your system drive. Move your iPhoto Library to a small portable drive as described here: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library
A second problem is, that you cannot save space on your computer by uploading to iCloud Drive, because iCloud will keep local shadow copies of all items in your user library. Moving files to include Drive will not save any space at all. (iCloud Drive FAQ)
In theory, you could use iCloud Photo Library to store your photos and remove them from iPhoto on your computer. However there are a couple of reasons you might think about not doing this at the moment.
FIrstly you can't directly add photos from iPhoto to iCloud Photo Library and doing so indirectly would be time consuming. Secondly, there is no facility to keep photos in albums or any other structure in iCloud Photo Library and some photos wouldn't fit into the iCloud photo library moments structure.
You might want to revisit the idea when icloud photo library is eventually available for OS X and see what features it includes, until then, I'd put your iPhoto library on an external drive.
iCloud Drive and Photo Library
