I have an iphone 4 running 7.1.2 and I’m running out of storage. I have iCloud selected for photos for both ‘My Photo Stream’ and ‘Photo Sharing’ and when checking iCloud status have 5gb available – can I or how can I transfer photos from the Camera Roll into the iCloud to increase the storage on my phone?

I’m using an iphone 5s so not sure if its the same on your iphone 4.

Goto Settings -> iClould -> Photos

First make sure its enabled and then also select the “Optimise iPhone Storage” tab.

I dont have that “Optimise Iphone Storage” tab??

Or throw them all in Flickr. It’s free.

Download the photos from your phone onto your computer. Flickr or Google Photos both have automatic uploads from iOS so that’s not a bad shout either, but not sure if there is a quick way to delete the old photos and personally I like to keep my photos local as well as in the cloud.

In iOS 8.something they introduced “iCloud Photo Library” which is cloud storage for your photos. With this came the option to “optimise iPhone storage” whereby the phone only keeps thumbnails of your photos and downloads them from iCloud when you want to view them. In theory popular and recent photos are cached locally on your phone.

If you’re on iOS 7 you won’t have the option of iCloud Photo Library and, perhaps more importantly, you will soon use up that free 5Gb and need to pay for more iCloud storage for photos if you enable it.

My Photo Stream and Photo Sharing are something different, with the former only keeping your last 1000 photos in iCloud.

Apple and photo management is a confusing mess, but their website is as good a place as any to make (some) sense of it.

Ah didn’t realise it was only on IOS 8+

As stilltortoise says, try downloading Google drive app or Microsoft One Drive app.

They both come with 15gb of cloud storage and both have options to auto upload your photos to the cloud. You can then manually delete any photos on your phone to free up some space.