My first reply didn't show up, so hopefully, this isn't a duplicate. In answer to Gail (and thank you for your time), yes. The 'new' option has been checked and the only things being downloaded are photos taken after checking that option three days ago. Not one single older image has shown up downloaded. Only newly photographed or newly screen captured items are downloaded and it is immediate.
I GIVE UP.
Tomorrow, I am calling our Apple store to make an appointment to go in with a flash drive, and my laptop (in case the later is needed) and have THEM pull all my master photos for me. I wasted a few more hours tonight trying to get my precious photos. I figured out that if I put them in a shared folder from my phone to the iCloud, I can see them on my laptop and save all at once to a harddrive folder. The problem is, Apple in it's infinitely confusing sense of wisdom, reduces the shared master files drastically. If I save it individually from the cloud, the files are several MB's large each. But through the shared folder, they are less than 100KB's each. VERY low resolution.
It shouldn't be this hard for someone to SELECT more than one master image, and download it to their PC. ho t
Thank you to all who tried to help. Now I hope I can get Apple to do it for me.
