iCloud drive won't allow me to delete folders

i have like 79 gigs of pictures i uploaded.. but once i found out the reason my system was so slow was due to iCloud i unplugged my external drives where my files originated from and rebooted my machine disabled the iCloud drive in settings then logged into the web client for iCloud drive and tried to delete all that stuff from my cloud account but it won't do it. it appears i can delete files just not folders.. problem is i have 79 gigs of pictures.. any ideas? id like to remove those files from iCloud drive without having to delete each file lol... that would take a lot of time. this whole iCloud thing should be way easier than it is.. what a headache