I know 'Photos' takes a long time to upload but get this...

Recently I took the plunge and signed up to Apple iCloud space. Now, I know it takes a long time to upload Photos to iCloud but hey, get this:

I have 12,481 pictures, and over the last 6 nights all downloading for say 8-9 hours, I still have 10,387 to go. Doing the maths that is 2097 pics at average say 4Mb per image uploaded over say 48 hours, equating to 8388 Mb uploaded over 172,800 seconds = 0.048 Mb/s. My upload signal is not great but does average 1 Mb/s, which is significantly greater than the indicated performance.

I followed the simple Apple page instructions: in OS X go to System Prefs / iCloud/Options and selected iCloud Photo Library, then went to Photos/Prefs/iCloud and turned on the upload and left it overnight, pausing during the day, resuming at night. My MacBook Pro is a 2012 model, 2.9Ghz i7, and has plenty of storage headroom.

So either I have missed something obvious, or something else is throttling the performance.

In addition I cannot see where the 2097 images have actually gone. Apple indicates 'you can view photos...in OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 ..' ; but upon opening iCloud Drive (the only likely place I can see in Finder that would store such images) there is nothing for Photos, only files stored for Pages. in addition to that, I have invited others to view the images, but they cannot see anything either.

Where have they gone?

Grateful for any assistance on this.