I Have a mac at home which when I first bought and didn’t fully understand I copied all my photos on my PC to an external Hard drive then onto folder I created on the Mac.
I then uploaded all the photos into the photos app on the mac which also uploads them to my iCloud. I can now view all my photos on any device which was what I wanted. I have around 180gb of photos and everything was working fine. Then one day my 200gb ICloud account told me I didn’t have enough storage, I thought maybe I had used all the available space so I upgraded to the next plan up which is 1Tb. I noticed the other day that I have around 180gb stored in folders on my iCloud drive and when I looked it is also uploading the photos in the folder I originally created when copying the photos from the PC.
My question is can I delete the file containing the original photos? I have all of them backed up on an external hard drive and Flickr so I’m not worried about losing them temporarily.
Also is there a way of downloading everything from the cloud onto the mac so I can create a copy on my external hard drive. The pics I have taken on my phone for instance that show up on the mac but I’m not sure if they are locally stored or being viewed from the cloud.

Thanks in advance if any of the above makes sense

Andy