copy photos from phone to a folder on iCloud drive

You can select the photos in the Photos.app and use the Share menu - Share to iCloud Drive. This will bring up a list of application folders to save the photos to, and most of them will be grayed out as incompatible. I cpuld share them to the Previews folder, and the photos appeared on iCloud drive on my Mac, to be opened in Preview. All photos had retained their capture time and the GPS coordinates.

Did you check the complete Share menu by scrolling it to the right? You may need to click the More option to add iCloud Drive. I am using iOS 10. Which version do you have?

iCloud Drive is inebled in your Settings > iCloud, right? Then consider to update to iOS 10, if your iPhone supports it. It has been released today. But I would wait, until the first rush is over and you can besure, that there are no major bugs in this first release.

I don't remember, if "Add to iCloud Drive" has been supported in the previous system. You have scroled the share options to the right and clicked the three dots to open the "More" menu to add more Share options?