Is it really not possible to create and fill a photo album?

I have been trying to figure out the iCloud Photo Library feature for about 2 hours without success.

I develop pictures using Lightroom and Photoshop which I assume is a fairly common workflow. I want to develop pictures and then move them into albums in my iCloud Library. Not easy.

My first attempt was to export from Lightroom to the "Uploads" folder. That folder was created by the iCloud setup procedure (... in my case: c:\users\tim\pictures\iCloud Photos\Uploads). Both the "Photo Stream" and "iCloud Photo Sharing" options are checked in the Photos Options panel of the iCloud configuration utility, however, pictures in Uploads don't get uploaded. Library content was not changed.

Ok ... so my next idea was to go to iCloud.com and upload them manually. That works - sort of - but incredibly there is no option to create a photo album from iCloud.com. Given I have about 30,000 pics and given iCloud Photo Library is advertised by Apple as the place to store all your pictures (I'm OK paying for storage), it seems bizarre you can't create a photo album from their web access site.

Ok ... so my next idea was to fire up my iPad and create a photo album there first. You can create empty photo albums there and when I went back to my PC, logged into iCloud.com the new album appears - looks promising. I then navigated to that empty album and pressed the "Upload" button. .. bad news ... the photos still upload to the "All Photos" album only.

It is possible to go back to the iPad (or iPhone) to find those uploaded pictures and move them into the album but the workflow/UX is awful. Why make the user jump through so many steps and multiple devices just to push a developed picture into a library?

Am I missing something?

Thanks